GPL FUDs itself

For folks like me in the closed-source camp that cringe every time companies like Microsoft go off on a FUD mission against open source, I was disappointed to the see that a prominent member of the open-source community has given his adversaries plenty of ammunition with a childish and ill-conceived stunt. The full story is here, but basically what happened (according to the article) was a guy called Harald Welte, who is a Linux kernel developer, served 13 companies with warning letters because he "claimed that the binary code of the companies' products appears to have used GPL code" (emphasis added).

Serving the warning letters is probably fair enough. If they have violated the GPL license, they need to rectify the situation. But then to go out and publicly name and shame the companies for appearing to do something, without even giving them a chance to respond, and to turn the event into a media circus by doing it at the CeBIT exhibit hall is the type of stuff that will be bought up by sales and marketing folks for commercial offerings for my moons to come. Open source has come a long way, and it is disappointing to see it use these college prank antics. It would be interesting to see the reaction if Microsoft pulled a similar stunt for people that appear to have used pirated software. Maybe someone can have a quite word in young Harald's ear about PR and the like.
Posted: Mar 16 2005, 04:49 PM by nick | with 5 comment(s)

Comments

TrackBack said:

^_^,Pretty Good!
# April 15, 2005 1:15 PM

nick said:

It's important to remember that the guy had previously contacted the companys for a duration of months before he made the information public. He didn't just spring it on the companys.

Most companys realize what they have done and fix the situation. Some ignore him. He goes after those that ignore him.

I think you're also being a bit strict about the word "appear". He has disassembled code posted on his site which details exactly what was copied and from where. Things which are usually pretty hard to "accedently reinvent". Exported function names with jokes from the authors, etc. We do a lot of that silly stuff. ;)

Either way, he gave them notice before publicising it. They ignored him. That's pretty bad imo.


Fortinet offers a variety of Firewall and Antivirus Products (the FortiGate
and FortiWiFi product series), on which Fortinet claims to run the "FortiOS"
operating system. However, as the gpl-violations.org project uncovered,
"FortiOS" is using the Linux operating system kernel and numerous other free
software products that are licensed exclusively under the GNU GPL. This
information was not disclosed by Fortinet.


It's not hard to find an ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM, and verify which one it is with reasonable certainty. MS does this ALL THE TIME to pirating OEMs and such. No suprise that we would too.

I think you are comparing apples to oranges when comparing MS going after "people that appear" vs "companys that are actively making a profit off of." That's unfair.
# April 22, 2005 3:12 PM

TrackBack said:

^_~,pretty good!csharpsseeoo
# May 18, 2005 5:57 AM

TrackBack said:

GPL FUDs itselfooeess
# July 16, 2005 12:45 AM

TrackBack said:

GPL FUDs itselfooeess
# July 31, 2005 10:04 PM