More news on AOpen

Following up to my post two days ago, the news has now made it to golem.de.

AOpen wasn't quite happy about the bad press, so I was immediately contacted again. They're now working closely with their Taiwanese mother company to become GPL compliant ASAP. I'm eager to see the results, and hope that this issue can be put behind us soon.

However, I now re-discovered that the firmware image is actually download-able from ftp.aopen.de, a domain registered to the German subsidiary. So while the product might not have been sold in Germany, the firmware was actively distributed by Aopen Germany GmbH.

gpl-violations.org related press interviews

The spike of press coverage continues, which is good. There have been interviews and articles in magazines such as Infoweek and Computerwoche. This actually leads to people from outside the Linux / FOSS community recognizing the efforts of the project, and the licensing issues that many companies have when using GPL licensed software.

The FOSS community itself knows about the GPL and it's rules. We need to get this into the heads of product managers and the like. As soon as this happens, we'll probably be at a point where we'll see more GPL compliant products entering the market.

This press coverage has already triggered some interesting replies, on which I do not want to disclose more details at this point.

Back to ct_sync

I've managed to get back to work on ct_sync again. The final steps towards full multi-master operation are underway. Apart from some changes to the protocol on the wire, there is a major reorganization of almost all involved data structures.

I'm deeply sorry for not having been able to continue at the pace that I wanted (and promised some customers), but there have been lots of issues that I couldn't push back and had to deal with them immediately.

Both Acer and iRiver still have issues

Acer has now put up a mirror of all 2.4.x kernel versions on their support website. Clearly they do not understand what the GPL is about, despite our efforts. I fail to understand what is so difficult to grasp while reading a phrase like "complete corresponding source code, including scripts used to control compilation and installation".

Clearly, Acer's Aspire 1800 and 2000 series notebook don't only come with some unconfigured vanilla Linux kernel preinstalled, but with a custom-tailored Linux distribution containing lots of other GPL licensed software.

iRiver seems to claim that they're no longer selling the product in Germany, and therefore don't need to release the source code. AFAICT, there are dozens of online stores who still sell PMP-1xx devices, and even iRiver Germany's homepage still advertises this series of players on it's front page (!).

What is this to tell us? They are not taking the issue of GPL licensing serious. Even after receiving warning notices and having signed declarations to cease and desist.

I'm going to make more and more open statements about such embarrassing details, which I didn't do in the past. Apparently it only helps to put the maximum amount of pressure onto those companies. Sad, very sad. I have no intentions of harming their business...