Bundling and the GPL

Posted Jun 20, 2006 22:07 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Bundling and the GPL by wilck
Parent article: Harald Welte on the flood of GPL violations

You'd be surprised. For a lot of hardware makers it's tough choice to do. "Normal users" like to have everrything working "out of the box". They will not connect new phone, PDA or DVD player just to make it functional.

Distributors are not the evildoers. Hardware makers are: instead of providing enough documentation to make truly free drivers possible they are playing games. And this is what we should try to stop.

Bundling and the GPL

Posted Jun 21, 2006 19:31 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (guest, #19270) [Link]

Note that for connected devices (like cell phones and TiVo-like DVRs), it is completely invisible to the user whether the device is complete "out-of-the-box" or downloads additional software. The needed transactions can happen as soon as the device is connected and the device is without its connected functions until it's connected, anyway.