Quote:
Originally Posted by seaniko7
You are absolutely right. What I meant is that I have seen such practice (separation of own modifications from OSS) being done by many vendors, one of which happens to be Onyx.
|
This is a huge issue in the licensing world. GPL itself is great, but seldom enforced. The big companies selling all around the world directly (read - all international phone/tablet/pc manufacturers) are of course afraid, because a swift court decision can easily force their products off the shelves.
However a small, chinese company with a relatively small level of penetration can do as they please. By the time the court enforcement comes (because in a case such as ours, all parties, including vendors, etc. must be included), the product is already discontinued, and the loss is mainly at the vendors.
Quote:
Originally Posted by seaniko7
All in all, it can be hard to prove whether a vendor has provided one with modified sources or only OSS part which he based on. Verification of such sources would require compilation and verification against binaries installed on a device and extracting these is a clear violation of license agreement in most cases.
|
Except Onyx released firmware update images that can be downloaded directly from their websites - and that includes the Android kernel image too.
Also, I believe such verification cannot be a license violation - GPL by its nature should allow it. Of course it's a different question if a product license goes against the license of a part (in our case, the GPL covered kernel), which one is the one to take into account.
Quote:
Originally Posted by seaniko7
Another issue is deliberate obfuscation of GPL code just to make it unusable (Onyx did that by stripping all assembly code, including OSS).
|
That is okay - however by GPLv2, Onyx must provide everything to anyone - in possession of the binary version - to be able to recreate the binary version. This includes sources, tools, documentations.