Chitech CT-PC89E - 8.9in ARM netbook with linux kernel, u-boot and new linux distro "MOS"

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2010-March/000339.html

hi folks i'm looking for some help and advice on ways to persuade a
company to "not go there" on a possible GPL violation.  we actually
want to work _with_ them rather than appear to be "against them", but
they are taking the view that we will "steal" their intellectual
property and give it away to a competitor, who will then "steal" their
product design and thus they will lose their investment.  they are
using this argument in order to withold provision of their
modifications to linux kernel source, u-boot source and the (entirely
new) linux distro "MOS", from http://mid-fun.com, citing that they
have invested significant money and time into the source code and they
want that investment back _before_ they will provide the source code.

they've sold 20 samples, fifteen of which have gone to free software
developers such as myself, and we're running out of time before a
competitor creates an alternative netbook, completely independently of
this mess.  so we want to get the GPL source code out of them as
quickly as possible, and turn it around and give it back to them in a
fit and reliable state so that they can sell a decent product: at the
moment, thanks to their paranoia, by cutting themselves off from the
usual free software development, they're struggling to get such large
amounts of software (an entire new linux distro!) into a reliable
state, violating FHS policy, debian packaging policy, ignoring linux
kernel development guidelines - generally getting themselves into an
unmaintainable mess.

we haven't been able to establish if mid-fun.com is the same company
as the original designers of the developer board (Seatron).  we _have_
been able to establish that it was China Telecom who did the original
research, and Chitech bought it from them and is "finishing it off".

we've reviewed the MOS distro and it's pretty damn good: it fits into
under 200mb and yet still provides video player, music player, web
browser, document reader, PDF viewer etc. etc. - it looks like a
Desktop OS yet it's the size of a PDA one.  there's some evidence to
suggest that it's based on Maemo (libosso and libhildon1 are
dependencies) but also possible candidates for a basis include
poky-linux: it's hard to tell.

we're giving them _one_ last chance before referring them to
gpl-violations, so i wanted to know if there's anything that we should
be saying, before going "ok, you leave us no choice but to refer you
to gpl-violations.org".  bearing in mind that once we _do_ have the
source code, we then want to continue working with them by fixing the
problems they're having with the source code.

tia,

l.