Comment by bluGill

Comment by bluGill 14 hours ago

Most of the time the GPL request is a waste of time with no purpose other than annoy a company. You can download linux source code from many places, why do you want to get it from us?

There is a slight possibility we have a driver that you could get access to, but without the hardware it won't do you any good. Once in a while we have hacked the source to fix a bug, but if it isn't upstream it is because the fix would be accepted (often it causes other bugs that don't matter to use), and in any case if it isn't upstream, the kernel moves so fast you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.

ndiddy 12 hours ago

Again I see no purpose in doing things this way besides trying to minimize the amount of people who look at your GPL code for some reason. Isn't it more annoying for the company to make someone in customer support read paper letters, burn the GPL package onto a CD-R, and mail it than it is to simply host the GPL package for each product on a support site or Github or something and include a link in the product documentation?

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ack_complete 3 hours ago

There's definitely a purpose, it's to obfuscate usage of GPL software and dodgy linkage. There's no other reason for situations like hosting a binary download as a plain download on a website while getting the source requires mailing a check or money order to a UK address.

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regentbowerbird 13 hours ago

You only have to serve those requests if you distribute your changes yourself.

So presumably as a hardware company you'd be offering your hardware with your custom linux installed, and then people wanting to audit or hack the product they bought would request the code from you.

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bluGill 10 hours ago

This is GPL2 - there is no requirement that you be able to install/use/hack the software, only that you get the same source.

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- pabs3 3 hours ago
  
  That is incorrect, the GPLv2 requires that you be able to modify the code, build it, reinstall the binary and run the modified binary.
  https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
  
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immibis 11 hours ago

There's actually a near-100% chance that the kernel on my device is not the upstream kernel. There's a near-100% chance that you have added some custom drivers or got them from your upstream. There's also a near-100% chance that you have written some scripts to install the kernel on the device, which you are required (at least one German judge thinks so) to share with me so that I can install a modified kernel on my device.

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