Re: Possible GPL Violation of Linux in Amstrad's E3 Videophone

Jon Masters
2004-10-02T10:28:05Z

jmerkey@galt.devicelogics.com wrote:

[ You snipped the original sender identification - the quote below forms
part of a response from Theodore Ts'o. ]

>>You should have attended Harald Welte's "Enforcing the GPL" talk at
>>the Linux Kongress this year. There are plenty of worked examples
>>where Harald and the Netfilter kernel developers have successfully
>>taken commercial vendors to court and got them to either (a) release
>>their enhancements under the GPL, or (b) stop distributing the GPL'ed
>>code. It can and has been done in the real world, with multiple
>>vendors, and they haven't lost a case yet.
>>
>> - Ted

> If you can obtain discovery and catch people with a "smoking gun."
> Very hard to do.

The smoking gun is very often obtained by dissassembling the device
firmware or program binaries and/or runing string comparisons.

> Inside some of these big companies with lots
> of money, most folks won't come clean or spoilate evidence.

It's hard to spoil the evidence when all of your customers have it.

<snip more anti-Novell comments>

> The simplest way is to add a clause to the GPL requiring people
> to obtain a license from the copyright holders if code is
> ever used in a commerical venture. There's no wiggle room --
> they will have to sign and ackowledge they accepted the GPL
> and ackowledge their obligations from the copyright holder.

I don't know what the world is like where you are (I admit that if
you're in the States you probably *are* more repressed than I am in the
UK right now) but you seem to have some extreme paranoia which seems
more than a little unfounded. The above is completely unnecessary - it
does nothing that using the GPL already does not do - but you seem to
have convinced yourself that the real problem here is the GPL.

Jon.