Quote:
Originally Posted by docidocus
@HarryT: I didn't hear of any tries to enforce the GPL in China, but that does not mean it can't be done. I didn't know of that convention which should make the GPL even more likely to be enforceable there.
@seaniko7: In my understanding of the GPL, if they were not granted access to the sources, they knowingly violated the GPL by selling these devices. Anyway, fear of competition may be a problem, but bad separation shouldn't. Works based on the program have to be released under the GPL. Did I understand you correctly?
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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.
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.
Another issue is deliberate obfuscation of GPL code just to make it unusable (Onyx did that by stripping all assembly code, including OSS).