On Monday 14 January 2008, James wrote:
Etaoin Shrdlu shrdlu at unlimitedmail.org writes:
The GPL does allow to sell your product (as opposite to giving it
away for free). Why should Montavista be sued if they respect the
GPL? As long as they distribute the source code with their products
(which admittedly I don't know), they are fine. Just because the
sources are not downloadable from their site, does not mean that
they should be sued.
Ummm, I guess you are new to a space that I have worked in for a very
long time. Let's make this simple. Why don't you just pose as
a company that need MV's EL (embedded linux) and ask for a listing of
all of the wonderful thing you can do with MV EL that are superior
to the public offerings of EL. Then ask them from their sourcecode
to these 'enhancements'. They are not alone, they are just
one of the companies selling a RTOS based on EL.
Have you ever used their products? Do you know for sure they don't give
you the code? (I'm just curious here, I don't want to be unnecessarily
polemic) I'm asking because in their site they say that they also give
you some development modules (for eclipse) and tools for rebuilding the
system, so this would seem to imply they also give you the source code.
It seems to me that the difference is not between small or big
companies, but rather between those who obey the GPL and those who
do not.
Naive, you are! Big companies have lawyer, lobyist and often
politicians in their pocket. Over the years most people, at least in
countries that pretend to have democracy, have seen this. Remember
how the Democratic politicians and state where going after MS and then
most of the issues got settled by republican. Yet the EU still slapped
MS with lawsuits and punitive damages? If you think small companies
are treated just like big one, you are very naive and no amount of
evidence will change your mind. Just ask most anyone that's been
in small business before.
What I know is that big companies have had their defeats too, and if that
has happened some times in the past it might happen again. This does not
mean, of course, that it will actually happen (I'm not *that* naive).
And, IMHO, carrying on with bad practices just because the world around
you behaves that way does not make you a trustworthy company (but it's
true that it does let you make lots of money).
You are talking about device drivers here, not products that have a
hidxden OS and use linux as the RTOS inside the product. Verifying
what is acutally inside of a close (RTOS) system is difficult, at
best, and often impossible it the firmware engineer wants to make it
difficult for other to analyze.
I don't have enough knowledge of the embedded world to speak here, so you
might very well be correct about this.
There is a group of firmware engineers that have publically stated
that they write for free any device driver for any company using EL.
To paraphrase that person, the problem is not finding coders to write
device drivers, it's convincing companies to open source their drivers
or allow their products to inter-operate with OS drivers
Agreed. But a closed source driver can be released either by a big
company or by a small one.
And if linux gains popularity, refusing to open source a driver might
actually turn out to be a bad thing for the company, since they will
lose interoperability (read: customers) more and more (at least for
general-purpose hardware modules; for embedded or specialized hardware
things might be different).
Other companies have been sued or notified, but not just because
they were big or small, but because they failed to obey the GPL
(xterasys, monsoon, fortinet, d-link...you can find tons of cases
just by googling a bit), someone even admitted their faults,
In some cases, the companies were declared guilty.
true, but it does not affect the point I'm trying to make. What you
are talking about is a drop of rain, in an ocean.
Maybe.
What the GPLv3 is doing is effectively keeping the little guys
from building products ~100% based on linux and open source. They
have not stopped a single well funded company (or an entire
country like China) from using linux and open source as they
choose.
Why should they have been stopped?
I'd just like the charade to end. GPL keeps the serfs on 'massa farm'
It does not stop billion dollar entities from doing whatever they want
with EL or any other OS (open source) software.
Again...why should these billion dollars be forbidden to circulate, or do
whatever, as long as the open source software rules are respected?
You seem to imply that a (free) software license is a way to stop people
from investing or making money.
Making money, even lots of money, with linux is not prohibited. What
is wrong is when someone does not obey the GPL, and that's what LJ
wants to do: to discover companies that try to benefit from the
