Impact on Resellers/Consultants

[Harald Welte]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 05:36:20PM -0500, Hardy, Allan wrote:
> I understand the netFilter cases was against OEMs who sold products
> with embedded GPL software.

Some of them, yes.

> Wondering how this would affect someone downstream, a reseller or a
> consultant who recommends, purchases for customer?
>
> Are they in violation as well?  I mean they are distributing, right?

yes, they are.  Of course they could then in turn start to regress onto
their upstream vendors.

> So for example, are all the resellers of Fujitsu, Asus, Allnet,
> Securenet's products using netFilter liable and need to offer
> netFilter source as well?

yes they are. 

> Per GPL, they cannot have a reseller agreement with terms that removes
> this GPL obligation, right?

no, they cannot.  Between whom would such an agreement be?  The original
copyright holders are the authors of GPL software.  Only they are
entitled to make any kinds of agreement.  no agreement between two other
third parties would be able to change that.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at netfilter.org>                 http://netfilter.org/
============================================================================
  "Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early
   architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going
   on while IP was being designed."                    -- Paul Vixie
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