[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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