Deutsche Telekom W700V GPL violation

[Sebastian Gottschall]

ard schrieb:
> 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.
>   
these strings i've found are from drivers/pci/pci.c and not the amazon tree
>   
>> 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
>
>
>