amicus_curious wrote:
Well, that doesn't seem consistent. If Actiontec, say, distributes the software in its product, it has to give the source to its customer. But if that customer further distributes it, he has to do the same for his customers. And so on. But Verizon didn't have to do that it seems. How is their distribution of it different than Actiontecs other than Actiontec being one level upstream?
It's hard to say without having the details of the arrangement between Verizon and Actiontec. First of all, once a customer gets a copy of the product, he may pass on that copy to another party without the GPL coming in to play, because of the doctrine of first sale - you don't need permission from a copyright holder to sell a legal copy that you have. So if Verizon buys a bunch of routers with installed software from Actiontec, and then sells them to its customers, Actiontec has a GPL obligation to Verizon but Verizon has none. Second, it's not clear how Verizon supplies firmware upgrades to the routers. The link on their website that gets the upgrade suggestively has "actiontec gateway" in its URL, which might mean that Verizon is just relaying it from Actiontec. This is the sort of complexity that's best dealt with using the legal discovery process, where all the details can be determined with accuracy. Looking from the outside all we can do is guess. But as I've posted here before, you can find dated evidence on the web that well before the suit against Verizon was filed, Actiontec was shipping routers without offering the GPLed sources, and that after the suit was over, they were offering the sources. That seems to have satisfied the copyright holders, and we in the peanut gallery have no standing to say that it's insufficient. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
