Clarification on a few points

Posted Feb 1, 2012 4:40 UTC (Wed) by tytso (subscriber, #9993)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by landley
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Rob, note that the SFC is demanding way more than just the .config file, as you stated in the busybox web page. So that's a bit of an inaccuracy in that web page that you've sited. They also are demanding the scripts that create a firmware image that includes the busybox executable. Whether or not this is really required by the GPL is a question which (as far as I know) no court has ever ruled on point.

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Clarification on a few points

Posted Feb 10, 2012 12:45 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Whether or not this is really required by the GPL is a question which (as far as I know) no court has ever ruled on point.

And I doubt it'll rule on it any time soon. SFC does not sue companies which tried to comply with GPL and just forgot to include couple of scripts in a tarball. It sues companies who blatantly violate it (that is: they neither give you source with binaries nor give you a written offer to provide such sources). When SFC is involved GPLv2 terms are no longer in play: offenders violated it, lost their rights and now must beg for forgiveness.

Of course it does not mean that the your question (is it fair to demand scripts used to build the image with GPLed component?) suddenly evaporates. But at this point it's morphed to the area of moral and conscience, not law.

How to avoid this problem? It's simple: publish the sources of the GPLed components. Toybox is not a solution. It may be first step on the path to the "true solution" (abandonment of all the GPLed components), sure. But if the plan is to remove all the GPLed components altogether, then I'd like to see the project with milestones and roadmaps.