FreeNAS GPL violation

[Rufus Dufus]

 Hi,

  Could the list review this and make sure I'm not off, on my assessment of
this GPL violation.


  It came to my attention that a open source project called FreeNAS, a
FreeBSD/m0n0wall based NAS distro was violating the GPL v2 and v3 (With the
latest version of Samba). I posted a message on thier forum, informing them
they were not in compliance in two key areas of the GPL license, first the
requirement of including the text of the GPL license and they needed to also
make available the source code to the GPL componets used. I was met with
what I would call finger pointing, the
source code is on the authors site, us providing source will cause
unregulated copies etc, and the FreeNAS author told me he didn't include the
GPL license itself because, quoting Olivier Cochard ;

"I didn't include the GPL licence itself because I don't want to create some
confusion with the user: FreeNAS code (shell script, and PHP code) is under
BSD licence, but some of the software that it use are under GPL licence (and
other licences too)."

Obviously he knew about the GPL and the other licenses he mentioned, and
made the decision not to honor the terms, but did include text regarding
m0n0wall ;
"Portions from m0n0wall, both documentation and source code, copyright
2002-2005 Manuel Kasper, and m0n0wall Documentation Project."

FreeNAS is also violating the terms of the Apache license for the
mDNSresponder and the PHP license for PHP v5 by not including thier license
text as well. And there is a possible license compatibility issue here as
well.


 The end users rights according to the GPL are being blantantly abused here,
one reading thier license gets the impression the entire project is
being distributed under the FreeBSD license.

The SVN for this project contains only patches for the various GPL componets
they used, the original source code not available, and nearly all of the SVN
entries for the GPL componets don't even tell you what version they are
using for the binaries they distribute.




 I think I was more than cordial about this situation with them, and
provided the information they needed to comply, unfortunately after some 2
months, I don't think they care about being in compliance.




Original post with me asking them to comply, please notice the date span and
the lack of response to my "Bump" message :

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1806830&forum_id=507589


SVN for the project, contains directory references to the GPL'd code :

http://freenas.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freenas/


FreeNAS license page from their website :

http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3&Itemid=23
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