IP-WARS.NET || 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter regarding their alleged GPL incompliance

13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter regarding their alleged GPL incompliance

By system5, Section Diary
Posted on Tue Mar 15th, 2005 at 20:18:55 EST

http://gpl-violations.org/news/20050314-cebit-letter-action.html

Some 13 vendors of commercial software and appliance products present at CeBIT receive an open warning letter against their alleged misuse of GPL licensed software. Those warning letters will be personally handed over to the respective companies at their CeBIT booth by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.

The list of companies includes high-profile names of the computing industry, such as Motorola, Acer, AOpen, and continues with Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware.

"While the Free and Open Source community is very happy to see more and more vendors adopt Linux and other GPL-licensed software, it is of great importance that those vendors comply with the respecitve license conditions, just like with any other software" states Mr. Welte. "The warning notice gives them a chance to fix their products, before someone might get them into legal troubles", he continues.

He seems sonewhat effective seeing as he does not hold the copyright to the violated code and does not use a lot of F*U*D tactics.

I think we need more guys like this!

< CIO: No ethics required? (12 comments) | Jonathan Cohen (6 comments) >

13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter regarding their alleged GPL incompliance | 20 comments (20 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter (4.00 / 5) (#1)
by mikey (mikey at badpenguins dot com) on Tue Mar 15th, 2005 at 20:28:38 EST
(User Info) http://www.ip-wars.net

I don't know if I like these tactics or not. What happened to quietly approaching vendors to attempt to work things out? What is the point to making a public debacle out of it?

---
DISCLAIMER:
IANAL, may have no idea what the heck I am talking about, yadda yadda yadda.

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter by Sunny, 03/16/2005 13:30:59 EST (4.16 / 6)
Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter by il1, 03/16/2005 12:34:03 EST (3.66 / 6)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter by mikey, 03/16/2005 16:09:19 EST (3.80 / 5)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter by il1, 03/16/2005 18:52:36 EST (3.71 / 7)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter by mikey, 03/16/2005 20:47:40 EST (3.66 / 6)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter by br3n, 03/15/2005 20:52:21 EST (3.50 / 4)

Interview with Welte on Cnet (3.85 / 7) (#18)
by system5 on Fri Mar 18th, 2005 at 07:56:41 EST
(User Info) http://lunchpale.blogspot.com

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/0,39023769,39185100-1,00.htm

Defender of the Linux faith

By Ingrid Marson, ZDNet UK

18 March 2005

ZDNet UK spoke to Welte about tracking down those companies that violate the GPL and how he persuades them to comply.

Q: Why is it important to stop people from violating the GPL?
Welte: You can use all the code out there for free, but if you do modifications you have to give them back to the community -- it's a fairness thing. If we allowed violations to become common, the system would be out of equilibrium. This would result in fewer contributions and it would have a large negative impact on the motivation of developers.

A good read.

system5

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r (3.66 / 6) (#17)
by br3n on Thu Mar 17th, 2005 at 21:37:08 EST
(User Info)

i surfed a few sites to see what kind of comments were being made and i am amzed at the way people are reacting to welte.
he is a coder with standing but there is lots of distrust of him and his motives,not from all but lots.yet you dont see the questioning when it comes to eggers and osrm.absolutely amazing at the contrast.

br3n

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r (3.50 / 4) (#3)
by br3n on Tue Mar 15th, 2005 at 20:55:59 EST
(User Info)

maybe i misread the site but i thought he was one of the netfilter coders himself so did hold copyrights to have standing?
now i am even more confused.
br3n

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by stewart, 03/16/2005 16:53:02 EST (3.80 / 5)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by Sunny, 03/16/2005 17:16:52 EST (3.33 / 3)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by stewart, 03/16/2005 17:22:36 EST (3.50 / 4)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by Sunny, 03/16/2005 17:28:01 EST (3.66 / 3)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by pgk, 03/16/2005 17:33:30 EST (3.50 / 4)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by Sunny, 03/16/2005 17:48:10 EST (3.66 / 3)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by stewart, 03/16/2005 17:45:47 EST (3.50 / 4)

Re: 13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter r by Sunny, 03/16/2005 13:34:38 EST (3.60 / 5)

On Slashdot Now Too (3.50 / 6) (#19)
by nono2sco on Fri Mar 18th, 2005 at 10:28:10 EST
(User Info)

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/05/03/18/0315241.shtml?tid=117&tid=156&tid=17

-
-
____ "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- Lord Acton

Bye bye spambot (none / 0) (#20)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Nov 28th, 2006 at 12:38:35 EST

This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter regarding their alleged GPL incompliance | 20 comments (20 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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