Hello Nils, I agree with you.
Huge companies earn huge amounts of money here by cheekily violating copyright law. The users on the other side are left alone by law, as only the real copyright holders (GPL programmers) could act, given they are made aware of it, have the energy, the resources and the time for such stuff, which they in 99% of the cases don't. When free & open source software is found in a firmware, *every user* should have the right to request the source code, including an option for sueing the violating company in case it does not comply. One could argue with the software being open to everybody being the intention of it's programmer and by him/her having declared this by through appropriate licensing, it should not anymore require the programmer him/herself for sueing the violating company. In my opinion the legislator has to become active on this shortfall. I understand you are an IT consultant. I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know (in Germany) there exists another powerful measure: a warning. A warning (+a punishment fee) can e.g. be issued by anybody, who is creating free & open source software for a commercial purpose and properly provides the source code for it. The "opponent" companies would then formally be competitors, and by not providing free & open source software source code they would commit an act of unfair competition. This can be subject to warnings with punishment fees by competitors. I am an IT consultat myself and I have already several times thought about issueing warnings to companies for unfair competition. I am pissed off by their ignorance towards the open source software programmer community. However, I do lack the time and resources for actually doing so, because I might really have to fight this through, possibly take it to court etc. I suppose, that's a similar situation for most open source programmers. I believe however, that open source programmer rights should not remain unclaimed and undefended. A wild idea appeared: A "GPL-Violations Fund" could be set up. Pissed programmers could transfer their "warning rights" to gpl-violations.org to be enforced in court if necessary. The collected punishment fees could e.g. go to the fund, from which free & open source projects are supported. What do you guys think about that idea? Best, Matthias
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