On Wednesday, 25 בAugust 2010 23:39:43 geoffrey mendelson wrote: > As far as I know the manufacturer of the box has to publish the code, > not the OEM or importer, who just sticks their name on it.If they have > a site in China in Chinese, with no other languages, with the code > available for download, or a comment that you send them ten dollars > for postage and producing a disk, they will send you the code, they > have fullfilled the GPL requirements.
Hey, hey, not so quick: * Importers are not exempt from copyright law: Please check http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/heb/docs/IL-copyright-2007.pdf An imported copyright infringing work is handled just as if the infringment was done in Israel (page 2, "definitions") * Also, from item 1 in the license (GPLv2): "... and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program." You can bet every sold device has nice page from company lawyers with tons of copyrights messages regarding *their* rights. Failing to include a copy of the *GPL license* is a violation in itself. * If you check item 3 in the license, you'll see that for commercial distributor the only valid options are: - Supply the source with the program - "Accompany it with a written offer..." to supply the source code. Now try to convince a judge that publishing in some manufacturer's web-site is equivalent to this. I haven't seen a company waive its rights away so easily as you just did for Free Software projects... Let's be more carefull next time. -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 [email protected] http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron There are only 10 types of people in the world- Those who understand binary, and those who do not. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
