E-Lead EL-460 might violates GPL

[Thomas Charron]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:51 AM, 魏藥/Medical-Wei <medicalwei at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>     I'd like to ask for the process of issuing a GPL violation,
> because I found a product which might violated GPL or LGPL.
>     I found that E-Lead [1] EL-460 [2] (a net-top) preinstalled
> GNU/Linux (which is based on Ubuntu) has some modified packages which
> is to cooperate with its proprietary program called Noahpad. Noahpad
> is used to display the status of the special touchpad-keyboard. E-Lead
> modified SCIM [3], which it is LGPL licensed, in order to show
> different soft-keyboards for different input methods on the screen,
> but I cannot get the source code neither of SCIM nor of Noahpad.
>     It is possible that the program also violates GPL because of the
> inheritance of Linux kernel and some part of GPL-ed programs.
>     Months ago, I've mailed them for the source code of SCIM and
> Noahpad, but they have no reply at all; maybe they didn't receive the
> mail at all.
>     Should I contact them in other methods? or what's the next step I
> have to take?
>
> [1] http://www.e-lead.com.tw/Engweb/index.asp
> [2] http://www.noahpad.com/
> [3] http://www.scim-im.org/

  This sort of request comes up often on this list.  IMHO, the best
course of action is to contact the authors of the application as well
as the offenders together.  We, as users of GPL software, I do not
believe have a legal right to demand the source, merely to request it.
 If they do not provide the source, they are then in violation, and
have no valid license.  However, they are now in violation of the
authors rights, and not ours.

  I believe this is one of the reasons why it is helpfull to actually
assign rights to the FSF.  By assigning rights to the FSF, the author
gives the FSF the legal right to pursue violations.  Comments?

-- 
-- Thomas