GPL Victorious Again
Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 Posted in Linux | No Comments »The gpl-violations.org project has scored another victory, this time against Fortinet, whom they accused of not only violating the GPL (by using GPL’ed source code without publicly releasing their changes) but actually trying to hide that usage with encryption.
Edit (I hit “publish” too soon!): They settled out of court, with Fortinet agreeing to make the source code available for their customized Linux kernel and other GPL’ed software they snurched from other projects, and to include the GPL in their licensing terms.
This is the latest in a string of victories for the gpl-violations.org project. Since starting the project in 2004, Welte has negotiated more than 30 out-of-court settlements.
But then, “the GPL has never been tested in court,” right?
The Geek Factor
Wednesday, October 27th, 2004 Posted in Computers/Internet | 1 Comment »I saw this CNET headline — Microsoft battles piracy with free software — and my first thought was that they were using some GPL’ed/BSD’ed/etc. tool for tracking or some such. No, they’re just giving away free software to people who will let them remotely verify that their OS installation is legit. Which makes perfect sense once you get out of the open-source/Free software (with a capital F) mindset.
In other news, I feel like I’ve spent the entire month of October rebuilding, recovering, restoring, repairing, reinstalling and retrofitting computers.
Strike that. I have spent the entire month doing that. *Sigh*
