[Fedora-legal-list] Fedora GPL Violation

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 04:06:37PM -0800, John Terhune wrote:
>We recently purchased a traffic shaping network device from a company
>called Exinda. While the device performs quite well, from looking at a
>firmware update image I noticed that it was based on Fedora Core.
>Nowhere in their documentation is it mentioned they are using GPLed
>software, and there is no offer to release source code. I opened a
>ticket with them asking for code under the GPL but was ignored.
>
>Would this be the appropriate place be to report such a violation?
>
>Here is some of the text from the build script included with the
>firmware image. The bulk of the image is GPG encrypted.
>
>
>BUILD_HOST_OS="LINUX"
>export BUILD_HOST_OS
>BUILD_HOST_OS_LC="linux"
>export BUILD_HOST_OS_LC
>BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM="LINUX_FEDORA"
>export BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM
>BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_LC="linux_fedora"
>export BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_LC
>BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_VERSION="CORE6"
>export BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_VERSION
>BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_VERSION_LC="core6"
>export BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_VERSION_LC
>BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_FULL="LINUX_FEDORA_CORE6"
>export BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_FULL
>BUILD_HOST_PLATFORM_FULL_LC="linux_fedora_core6"

While I am certainly not a lawyer, the above seems entirely
inconclusive to me.  I read that as "This was built on a
Fedora Core 6 host."  That doesn't mean that the image itself
contains GPL code.

While it may be very likely that it does, I think you need
to dig further to figure that out for sure.

josh