GPL violation in iBoxes

[Harald Welte]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 04:58:07AM +0100, Grzegorz Ja??kiewicz wrote:
> Hi
> There is small Korean company, maufacturing devices called I-box.
> IT's the VoIP device, basicaly CPU and DSP. Seems to be running linux:
> telnet 10.0.0.18:

Thanks for reporting this.

> But yet they refused to give me the sources of this system.
> I asked also my ISP that I have this box from, galaxytelecom, based in
> Vancouver Canada.

I'm not familiar with the canadian legal system, but my guess is that it
is exactly (and probably only) your ISP's responsibility to give you the
source code (because he gave you the object code).

> Comany manufacturing this equipment is called  Nicstel (www.nicstel.com).
> >From galaxy folks I know that they have been requests of sources in
> the past, but non of them sucessfull. 

Please point out to your ISP that they are basically committing
copyright infringement, and that it is their responsibility to provide
the source code to their customers.  How they get it from nicstel is
solely their problem, and they are not allowed to distribute that
particular product without the GPL license text and the full
corresponding source code.

> What this company wants for sources is money, which is rather outrage
> to me.  What shall I do ?

It's hard to make any legal claims unless you are the copyright holder.

Maybe you can write a (paper) letter to that ISP, pointing out that it
is they are committing copyright infringement by distributing those
products.  They have to stop distributing the product until they are in
full compliance with the license.

Please point them to the GPL FAQ of the FSF, and maybe the FAQ's on the
gpl-violations.org homepage.

Also, I cannot find the "I-box" product on the nicstel.com homepage.  Do
they make firmware images available somehwere?  If yes, I would be
interested to analyze it.

-- 
- 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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