Possible GPL violation by Avermedia

[Mikhail Gusarov]

You (hartmut.hackmann at t-online.de) wrote:

 HH> I can't tell for sure of corse, but the "matter of policy" might
 HH> be the silicon tuner on this card. I know that Xceive is (or
 HH> was?) very restrictive with information about this chip. And they
 HH> have the right to be so.  I can easily imagine that the tuner is
 HH> the reason why Avermedia built the binary only driver as the most
 HH> simple solution. My personal opinion is that this is better than
 HH> not providing anything and this is why i asked to keep the ball
 HH> low.

Would you be just silent if
Nvidia/ATI/what-is-your-video-card-provider stop providing drivers for
every system except some chosen one (say, RedFlag)? Do you think
IBM/Intel/HP/other-big-company would tolerate their IP/license
violations? And why would OSS community tolerate it in this case? They
released binary-only driver only for 4 distros, and they do not
guarantee even updates for future versions of the this distros.  Would
you like to be stuck with RedHat 6.2 only for which your tuner would
have binary-only drivers?

Avermedia already released the drivers, and "it's better than nothing"
argument is silly: they just stolen code from v4l, to save some
resources for development. Stolen code is not very hard to
reimplement. Stolen code does not contain know-how which would be hard
to learn. So they were lazy, and they violated GPL, so it would be
honest to force *Avermedia* regulate the legal questions with Xcieve,
not the v4l developers.

And, please, keep gpl-violations mailing list in CC.

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JID: dottedmag at jabber.dottedmag.net