[jlark]

Originally Posted by docidocus

@bulek: In my understanding of the GPL you are right. Although for example ereader-store.de is only a reseller, they are the sole contract partner for their customers. This means, they are be responsible for giving the sources to their customers and not Onyx itself. So this thread should more correctly be about Onyx' and its resellers' GPL violations.

Originally Posted by docidocus

@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?

Indeed:

" 5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying
the Program or works based on it."

(emphasis mine)

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 a blatant violation of the spirit of the GPL, and as it happens of the letter too:

"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

Note that I am not a lawyer, but the license is clear.

Originally Posted by docidocus

We want to be heard by Onyx and strive for a friendly agreement with them. The last thing we would want is, denouncing Onyx in any way. Quite the contrary, we just want them to respect the GPL including their rights and duties. This way, we want to save Onyx from juridical consequences following their GPL violations if they cooperate.

I personally think enough has been done to try to get their attention, repeatedly throughout the years, and their attitude is obvious. I suggest we gather all needed information for reporting them, and leave this to the professionals (i.e.: the lawyers). See here why: http://gpl-violations.org/faq/legal-faq/ -- everything so far got settled at the 'cease-and-desist' level, so no juridical consequences, and their experience is that until the lawyers get involved they simply get ignored, like we did.


For background, I purchased a Boox Max in April and received it in May, and I wrote to Onyx at the end of June asking for a bug tracker and for the source code. Their answer:
"Thanks for your email and support of ONYX BOOX. Now we still have no bug tracker, but we open SDK, if you have Github account, please inform us, TKS"

They later answered by creating a read-only public trello board (...), and never replied to my telling them there's nothing related to the Max on their github.

So in early July I sent them a formal request for the source code of the kernel and U-Boot source code. They never replied.

At the end of July I sent a formal request to ereader-store.de, and after a to-and-fro between email and their tickets system they replied on August 2nd by telling me they forwarded my request to Onyx, along with a promise to push them for an answer. They also stated their position that they are only a reseller and not developers, to which I replied it's their responsibility to provide the code nevertheless (without quoting the GPL though). No news since then.