ASUS Violation?

[Mr Smith]

>From: Francois Beerten <francois.beerten at teledisnet.be>
>
>The code embedded in the device can be GPL'd. But i'm afraid embedded code 
>does not count as distribution. Asus can make the code available if they 
>wish, but they don't have the obligation.

Something clearly gets lost in translation for the word "distribution" for 
Belgium.

If ASUS is providing the Premium in the US then under US Federal Copyright 
law they are distributing the code.  Even if you have to pull chips off the 
circuit board and use an eeprom reader to get access to seeing the code 
used, it still continues to be distribution.  As soon as the chip physically 
changes hands, they have performed distribution of the code.  The fact that 
this is in a chip soldered to a circuit board that and they don't intend to 
allow you to read back or change the code does not matter.  Also, the fact 
that it is on a chip instead of a CD, DVD or hard drive also does not 
matter.

Otherwise, people could produce cheap knock offs of ASUS motherboards with 
the same exact BIOS code since the BIOS is "embedded" code.  Instead, 
Phoenix, AMI and Award can still assert copyright control over the embedded 
work and require licensing.  Likewise, a GPL author can require the terms of 
the GPL to be honored or alternative licensing be aquired from the copyright 
holder.  If neither are followed the copyright law allows for damages to be 
awarded to the copyright holder (even if there exists terms in which the 
copyright work could have been distributed for free).

What is *NOT* distribution is providing the *results* from a GPL app.  Just 
because the bash shell is under the GPL does not mean the output of every 
bash script also falls under the license.  However, what is embedded isn't 
just the results of GCC but also the binary representation of GPL covered 
code.  In this case, since what was fed into GCC is GPL the results remain 
GPL.

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