Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[John Gilmore]

Walter asked:
> Are there any places where Sugar is in violation of its licenses?

Sugar is licensed under the GPLv2, and its source code seems to be
provided.  (Because it's written in an interpreted language, it never
ships binaries -- I think.  There may be some small parts that are
written in C or C++ to be called from Python, which, if they exist,
would have to be looked at.  If they're tiny, the easiest thing would
be to just include the tiny source code in the binary release.)

Sugar before 8.2.0 violated the "notice" part of the GPL, because
running it never told its users of the license, or about what rights
they have.  I filed this bug (http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6929) and
eventually also wrote the initial changes to fix it, which DSD put (in
improved form) into 8.2.0.

The GPL requires modified versions to be identified as such, so that
users will know they aren't running the stock version released by the
mainline author.  This GPL requirement is honored largely in the
breach by most distros (they patch GPL'd programs all the time,
without modifying the version string that is printed by the program).
Development versions of Sugar may violate this requirement, if the
version-string support in Sugar doesn't notice that it's in between
formal releases.

In Sugar's case, the main copyright owner is OLPC, so OLPC is unlikely
to sue itself over violations.  Sugar may contain contributions by
others who have not assigned their copyrights to OLPC, which would
give those contributors standing to object (or sue).

Some of the activities that the Sugar team maintains may not fully
comply with the GPL.  Ticket http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6930 tracks
that issue.  Several such activities have been improved (many were missing
a copy of the GPL, or a copyright notice in their source code).

	John