Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[James Cameron]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:27:52PM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> Interesting. I have never received a Linux system with either the
> source code or a written offer of source code.

Oh?  That's not supposed to happen.  If a hardware vendor provides a
system with Linux on it, that is distribution, and they are certainly
obliged to provide the source code or offer.  If you received the system
as hardware only and you obtained the software yourself, then the
hardware vendor has no such obligation.

> I expect that if faced with this question directly, governments would
> uniformly assert that they are the consumers, and that no court in
> their countries would disagree, since the government paid for the
> equipment.

Inasmuch as the government becomes the hardware vendor, the act of
distribution is by them, to their end-users.  For that use-case, OLPC
would merely need to support the provision of source by that hardware
vendor.

-- 
James Cameron    mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org     http://quozl.netrek.org/