Deutsche Telekom W700V GPL violation

[ard]

Hello,

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 03:35:40AM +0200, Felix Fietkau wrote:
> Forget iwconfig. I've analyzed the strings of the binary to look for more 
> patterns, since I believe those accusations to be entirely credible. To 

I don't, until I've verified them myself ;-).

> me it looks like they grabbed a lot of code for stuff from Linux for 
> whichever functionality they didn't have in their proprietary OS.
>
> Here are some strings from the Linux PCI subsystem (which are copied  
> verbatim, I compared against Linux 2.4.35, although it's likely that they 
> were 'fishing' in an older version of Linux)

Well, much of the PCI messages that I found in the unpacked
binary seems to be mips/amazon initialization code. (Which you
can find in the openwrt svn tree ;-) ).
This indeed seems to be a violation of the GPL.

> Additionally, strings of applications, user space stuff, libraries like  
> OpenSSL, etc. are mixed together with kernel code and the snippets that I 
> pasted here, which makes me doubt that there is any kernel/user 
> separation in this code. This would also make it legally impossible to 
> include the aforementioned code in a proprietary OS like this.

I haven't done anything more than string -a the binary :-).
However, the string -a leads me to believe that specific
mips/amazon pci initialisation code is used, which probably is
derived from a standard linux pci initialisation code , and
therefore should be GPL. That alone justifies calling it a
violation, although I think that it needs more technical
disection/proof than just strings -a. (Like: the assembly code
will probably contain enough hints to certain loops and such).

Regards,
Ard van Breemen