A week later: Apologies for the tone of this post. It was ill-considered and rude. I did change the title on the message shortly after I posted, but this didn't update the original thread title. Thanks to the moderator who fixed it. I have avoided saying anything else for a week so things can die a natural death. I'd just add that the responses were measured and well deserved. billingd 2010-08-17
Borders Australia have released an SD card firmware (1.4)
image links for AU/NZ
A quick analysis shows that it contains runs linux -
which we already knew - and ships with a busybox binary that contains a GPL V2 licence string. I have raised the small matter of the source code with Borders Australia. I wait with baited breath for not much to happen.
US readers may have more joy as there are a number of court cases active there. See
groklaw for a discussion.
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For the technically inclined, download bordersau-full-1_4.tgz. Download size is 123 MB.
As the .tgz suffix implies, it is a gzipped tar file. This is a standard unix thing. There are many Windows utilities that will open it, including 7-zip.
The file has been tarred, then compressed twice with gzip. A more descriptive name would be bordersau-full-1_4.tar.gz.gz
I have generated a list of files and posted it on the
other thread.
$ gunzip bordersau-full-1_4.tgz
$ tar tzf bordersau-full-1_4.tar > bordersau-full-1_4.txt
Given the file structure and presence of busybox, it is almost certain that the KOBO runs linux and used GPLed code.
If we look at the busybox binary:
$tar --strip-components=2 -xzf bordersau-full-1_4.tar ./bin/busybox
$strings busybox
we see:
Copyright (C) 1998-2006
Erik Andersen, Rob Landley, and others.
Licensed under GPLv2.
Oh dear.