Harald Welte on the flood of GPL violations [LWN.net]

Harald Welte on the flood of GPL violations

Posted Jun 20, 2006 10:13 UTC (Tue) by etienne_lorrain@yahoo.fr (guest, #38022)
Parent article: Harald Welte on the flood of GPL violations

The main problem of GPL violations is the number of software developpers who now refuses to write or contribute to GPL software for free (i.e. not being paid by a company which itself releases the software under GPL), because their work or contribution will simply be stolen.
You can now go to high street shops and buy (embedded) equipment with "Linux" written on the packaging and never see a line of source code, like this kind of thing:
http://smartdisk.com/eWeb/smartdiskus/www/staticpages/Fla...
If someone writes some GPL software, he will just find the time to try to write few documents to help his users, so going to courts in each of the EU countries is a no-no.
There was once an international copyright treaty...

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Harald Welte on the flood of GPL violations

Posted Jun 22, 2006 16:46 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

Some of these companies that sell boxes with Linux / other GPL software have a page in the back of their manual, or on a separate page with the text of the GPL. Sometimes there is a "written offer" page as well, but without one you can take the GPL itself as the written offer.

So, if you want the source code to all GPL software installed, write a nice business letter to the company requesting copies of the source for all GPL licensed software included in the appliance.

Don't expect too much though. You'll probably get a burned CD containing bog-standard Samba, Linux, busybox, etc. Either that, or a download URL.