28 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
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More and more vendors of various computing devices, especially network-related
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appliances such as Routers, NAT-Gateways and 802.11 Access Points are using
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Linux and other GPL licensed free software in their products.
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While the Linux community can look at this as a big success, there is a back
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side of that coin: A large number of those vendors have no idea about the GPL
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license terms, and as a result do not fulfill their obligations under the GPL.
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The gpl-violations.org project has started legal proceedngs against a number of
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companies in violation of the GPL since December 2003. Those legal proceedings
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were quite successful so far, resulting in some 30+ amicable agreements and three
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granted preliminary injunction. The list of companies includes large corporations such as Siemens, Asus or Belkin.
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The speaker will present an overview about his recent successful enforcement of
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the GNU GPL within German jurisdiction.
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He will go on speaking about what exactly is neccessarry to fully comply with
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the GPL, including his legal position on corner cases such as cryptographic
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signing.
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Resulting from his experience in dealing with the german legal system, he will
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give some hints to software authors about what they can do in order to make
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eventual later license enforcement easier.
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In the end, it seems like the idea of the founding fathers of the GNU GPL
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works: Guaranteeing Copyleft by using Copyright.
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