Gph Aren't The Only Ones Goofing The Gpl ..

[torpor]

A very interesting article here:

Linux-based Motorola Cell Phones frustrate 3rd-party developers ...

Talks about the problems Motorola have been creating for 3rd party developers by not playing by the GPL rules properly ..

Okay, cell phones have interesting property to protect (specifically: cell networks, and their carriers, who are sooooper-paranoid), so it looks like Motorola are stuck between a rock and a hard place, but nevertheless, it is interesting to note that even giants like Motorola are playing dancing games with Linux and the GPL ..

Food for thought in future ..

 

[G Morgan]

I imagine Motorola don't have many customers who know what the GPL is forget threaten to start WW3 over it . Surely this is the sort of case for the type of fuss that was made on here, we are talking about a very large company making money on the back of a GPL violation. Surely the FSF need to have a knock on their door.

 

[mongolito404]

RTFA

They did send the sourcecode, the sourcecode has been posted on sourceforge, and gpl-violations.org has taken care of the case. It's not like GPL zealots didn't care about Motorala, but more like you don't know they did.

 

[Turambar]

Lets post it on slashdot anyway! That'll learn em!

 

[mongolito404]

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/07/2057240
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/15/1439219

 

[FluffyPanda]

This isn't even comparable. They are obeying the rule of the law, but not really the intent. In other words, they are providing everything that the GPL requires, but they are making it quite troublesome to really do anything with the rights that the GPL grants the consumer.

If anything, what Motorola is doing is worse than what GPH is doing since they are purposely playing the law and doing the bare mimimum that is required of them. GPH was simply negligent in failing to understand the license that they were using code under.

However, since Motorola is a much higher profile company they are coming under a lot more scrutiny for their slightly dodgy practiuces than GPH has for outright failure to comply. It's not really such an unfair situation.

If you live on these boards you might think that GPH is the only company to have been pulled up on GPL compliance failures, but you'd be wrong.

Disclaimer: I have read TFA, and others on this subject already, but my memory sucks.

 

[DijiTao]

Reminds me of the KHTML | Safari situation from awhile back.
(http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/29/1556252.shtml?tid=121&tid=95&tid=3)

The GPL has never required you to be helpful. While some of the things that Motorola have done are annoying it's clear they are following the letter of the law. The same can't be said of GPH who doesn't have anyway of justifying their current position.

 

[BradN]

Usually with situations like this (not sure specifically for the motorola case), but for set top boxes, etc... often the source code is released, but the boot system/program loaders require any binary to be signed in order for it to load - I think this is one of the issues the GPL V3 is meant to address.