[wellylug] Linux as selling point.
David Antliff
dave.antliff at paradise.net.nz
Thu Aug 11 08:23:16 NZST 2005
On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, David Murray wrote:
> The manufacturer sold a piece of hardware.
A piece of hardware with embedded software to Make-it-Work is not the same
product as a piece of hardware with no functional software. The
manufacturer sold a piece of hardware containing GPL software - you can't
avoid that even if most customers don't care.
> But where the product is not software, where the product is in fact
> hardware that just happens to have unmodified GPL'd software embedded
> within it as a component, then I'm less convinced that this is the same
> as the above example of re-distributing a browser that someone has
> written.
How do you know it's not modified if you can't view the source, compile
and install it yourself?
What if the unmodified software is found to contain a major security flaw?
Where is your recourse if you don't have access to the source? The GPL is
designed to prevent this situation too - but in this case you're stuck
because you don't know exactly what was used to create the binaries, even
if they *say* it's unmodified.
--
David.
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