Re: Linksys WRT54G and the GPL

[Russ Dill <Russ.Dill@asu.edu>]

> I suggest taking this slowly; just like no one here would like a bunch
> of lawyers breathing down their necks for something I'm sure their
> guys won't either - and that should probably be a last resort after
> people have tried a few friendlier contacts.

its clear from Andrew Miklas original email that this has been tried.
(although a second chance wouldn't hurt). However, if this was a company
distributing unlicensed sofware from a company that makes their living
selling software (Microsoft, Id, Symantec, Oracle, etc) I can assure you
that they would not be let off with a warning.

> In the case of busybox I guess they are just using a standard
> unmodified one; so in principal all they really missing is an
> acknowledgment pointing to its home page.

You guess? how can you know? What unreleased bug fixes could be lurking
inside? You don't know unless you have the source. This point is mute,
because a) it violates busybox's copyright, and b) another GPL program
included (udhcp) is most definately modified.

> In the case of the kernel do we know they've actually made any
> modifications at all? Or is it just a standard distribution from
> someone else?  Perhaps they've contributed changes back?

Well, they have nothing to lose by sending us their kernel source tree,
do they?

-- 
Russ Dill <Russ.Dill@asu.edu>