Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement
Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement
Posted Feb 2, 2012 13:18 UTC (Thu) by etienne (guest, #25256)Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement
A lot of hardware is currently being sold which do not comply with the GPL, take the example of tablets with graphic cards controlled by closed source drivers/modules.
The closed source stuff is known to be non compliant, but has been acquired, with the hardware, under a NDA - so the company producing that tablet has no right to show the driver to a SFC representative (who probably will not sign a NDA).
So the only solution for the company targeted by SFC is to stop selling the tablet.
IHMO the result will be that some other third party company will start producing a graphic chipset which can have a GPL driver/module, that will be slower (difficult to display HD MP4 movies) but at least legal (to sell, use or buy a tablet).
The closed source stuff is known to be non compliant, but has been acquired, with the hardware, under a NDA - so the company producing that tablet has no right to show the driver to a SFC representative (who probably will not sign a NDA).
So the only solution for the company targeted by SFC is to stop selling the tablet.
IHMO the result will be that some other third party company will start producing a graphic chipset which can have a GPL driver/module, that will be slower (difficult to display HD MP4 movies) but at least legal (to sell, use or buy a tablet).
OTOH, maybe some Linux distributions should more take care of the license of the software they are using, even if that bothers their users (startup messages telling where the BSD code is coming from...)