Archive for the ‘Licensing’ Category

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AOL UK uses curl in disguise

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

Information to this was mailed to me from a friend but is easily verified as I’ll describe below.curl tiny

America Online in the UK (AOL UK) is using our cURL application (without including the license anywhere) as part of their automated broadband router configuration CD for their AOL UK customer base. The CD is provided to all AOL UK customers and the automated router configuration component using cURL has been included with it for a couple of years.

The software includes the cURL application renamed to “AOL_Broadband_Installer.EXE“. There is no license included or mention of the license anywhere on the CD or installer, contrary to what’s required at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html.

The md5sum for AOL_Broadband_Installer.EXE matches the win32 binary in the curl-7.15.3-win32-nossl.zip release package I personally built and offer for download…!

If you want to check it out yourself, the direct link I figured out to the installer is here and I found it on this page (download the “easy installer” for Netgear DG834G).

Update: see my reply below.

Posted in Licensing, cURL and libcurl | 2 Comments »

Another GPL Lawsuit by Busybox

Saturday, December 8th, 2007

It seems SFLC works really hard for the busybox guys as they’re now suing Verizon for GPL license violations. Evidently they distribute a broadband wireless router for internet and IPTV use and they use busybox without offering or shipping the source code… Go get them!

It does remind of that story with David and Goliath…

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Ainol License Violation

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Ainol V2000 is one of them Chinese portable media players we see pop up every now and then in a never-ending series – most of them never really reach the western markets.Ainol V2000

For this particular player the firmware is available, and by simply inspecting the contents of that we can see that it is packed with open source and free software, but nowhere is the source for this package to be found… (not all of these packages are GPL licensed of course)

GEMDOS, Mplayer (various parts), unzip by Gilles Vollant, MAME, Snes9x, FLAC, wxMusik, VisualBoyAdvance, SDL, FFmpeg, Avifile…

The image also seems to contain code from Real and possibly also from Microsoft (based on a guess on the file name strings)…

And if you want to dig around more, here’s the 5.2 MB firmware file available for download. It seems Ainol’s official web site doesn’t even mention this V2000 model?

(Marcoen brought most of this to my attention.)

Posted in Electronics, Licensing | Comments Off

Busybox vs Monsoon

Monday, September 24th, 2007

For supporters of Free Software and Open source, and if you’re interested in the licensing angle you just need to pay attention to this:

Last week Groklaw posted this nice writeup on the case where the primary authors of Busybox sue Monsoon Multimedia. For GPL violations.

Update: the settlement that isn’t yet a settlement.

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GPL vs BSD

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

kerneltrap writes an interesting piece about how some Linux kernel developers wants to remove the BSD parts of the dual-license that appears in several files (and thus keep only the GPL-part) that are kind of co-developed with parts of the BSD community. Complete with lots of Theo de Raadt quotes. Spoiler: no, they’re not allowed to do so.

This was covered on slashdot.

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GPLv3 pains start now

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

rockbox Yeah, Rockbox ships as a GPLv2 licensed package, without the “or later” option for users to switch license at will. This has been all fine and dandy for a long time and Rockbox includes source from a busload of different other projects, licensed as GPLv2 and BSD etc.

Now, some of the projects Rockbox uses or wants to use are slowly turning GPLv3. First out being espeak, and the corresponding Rockbox patch for using it.

GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible. We cannot ship binaries built with a mix of these licenses.

So, we’re now starting to see the real-world effects of the GPLv3 license. Slowly some projects are going v3, and we (as in the Rockbox project) must remain with their older v2 sources until we take the jump (more or less forced) to v3 – only to then have the reversed situation as then we can’t use projects that are licensed strictly GPLv2 (without the “or later”)…

Sigh. The world is a complicated place.

Posted in Licensing, Rockbox | 1 Comment »

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