Originally Posted by Chubulor

Oh, I agree about the importance of the GPL. I was just surprised by how far the legal ramifications go, since to avoid liability, a retailer would have to check every piece of software on every device for copyright violations, even those stemming from failure of the original manufacturer to live up to license obligations on open source, which I would imagine to be especially difficult to track down. If retailers actually did that level of due diligence work, I don't see how there could even be a retail electronics industry, hence the surprise that they're required to.