[IAEP] GPL non-compliance, was Re: [SLOBS] GPLv3

Yamandu Ploskonka yamaplos at gmail.com
Wed Apr 20 23:18:41 EDT 2011


The excuse I was given by people who believe know more about this than I 
do is that code (source code) was not released because of security 
concerns - prevent stolen laptops, etc.

If you are correct that their code is plainly visible in the images, and 
those can be seen en clair, then I agree there's nothing wrong. I second 
you that I have never seen such code, and there seems to be evidence 
that either it is too hard too see, or everybody who has complained 
about this is as dumb as I am

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Apr 20 2011, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
>> AFAIK (please correct me) Uruguay is not providing code, thus in
>> violation of GNU license, and this situation has not been solved after
>> several years.
> Which code are you talking about?
>
>> With GPL 3 will the Uruguay security code be considered a System
>> Library and thus exempt from providing code? That might be an elegant
>> way out from what I believe has been their systematic non-compliance
>> in this respect, and maybe get them to open the rest (which is silly,
>> as the machines would still be blocked...)
> I don't understand.  If you're talking about security code that Ceibal
> has written then they're the copyright holder, and they're under no
> obligation to choose to release the source to it.  The GPL doesn't
> compel the original authors of code to do anything unless they are
> linking their code against a GPL-covered work.
>
> I don't think Ceibal's security code is linked to any GPL-covered work,
> and don't know why anyone would have that intuition.  I've never
> actually seen their code, though.
> If you're talking about Ceibal modifications to the Sugar core, then
> they're surely available by virtue of being shipped in Python source
> form in Ceibal's images, which satisfies the GPL.
>
> - Chris.


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