Quote:
Originally Posted by Barcey
Personally I find that the whole guilty until proven innocent mentality of the Open Source community is very disturbing. Bookeen can be accused of violating the GPL license but they are not guilty until they are proven to be guilty in a court of law and not the court of internet forums.
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Nobody says Bookeen is guilty, it's the court's right to say so.
However, you may easily find that Bookeen violates copyright of many GPL and LGPL-licensed products. That's not mystical mubla-jumbla, that's not something only 10 top-notch experts around the world can confirm, that's the basic and easy fact which every, I repeat, every seasoned Unix sysadmin may confirm.
Just get the Bokeen firmware update, find squishfs image inside, cut it out using dd(1), unpack and run strings(1) on files inside. Myriads of strings will appear, making it evident that Bookeen uses GPL/LGPL licensed code. And I swear Bookeen did not contact the authors and did not get the permission to redistribute their code under the license different from the GPL/LGPL. And product is not accompanied with written GPL license text and offer to get the source code by demand, as license requires.
Bookeen did not try to hide it. Maybe Bookeen devs did not read the licenses, maybe the not even aware such licenses are exist, or maybe they got the code from Netronix. This does not matter.
Only the fact that matters (according to the license) is that Bookeen distributes the firmware that violates rights of many open-source developers, and if anybody sues Bookeen he will certainly win the case. If plaintiff will be cruel enough, this will mean Cybook will have to recall all the devices or release GPL-derived code.
As reverse engineering shows, Mobi code in viewer is also GPL-derived due to inacurracy of Bookeen developers.