Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 02 Oct 2004 11:27:25 +0100 | From | Jon Masters <> | Subject | Re: Possible GPL Violation of Linux in Amstrad's E3 Videophone |
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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.
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