said by fAcEtIOUs:»
www.linksysinfo.org/modules.php?···&thold=0The GPL itself is an "all or nothing" license based on the economic and political theories of Karl Marx. It claims it can subsume any other license if a single line of "GPL" licensed source code is used anywhere in the source files. Should this occur, all source code files become magically GPL licensed in their entirety. Naturally this claim by the GPL has never been tested in court and the GPL folks have adroitly avoided any and all court cases that might lead to a thorough legal review of the GPL license terms.
Projects like OpenWRT have "re-licensed" large portions of Broadcom copyright source code (and Sveasoft copyright source code) as GPL licensed source code. Since the above license terms specifically and clearly forbid this, this means the entire distribution's copyright and license terms are in doubt. Since the GPL is "all or nothing", according to the terms of the GPL none of OpenWRT is covered by the GPL license anymore. Quite a catch-22.
Hopefully a US court will decide the validity and legal reach of the GPL sometime soon (GNU is a US-based organization).
IF the highlighted info above is correct as to the facts, then OpenWRT would have a very hard time winning anything in court. I doubt Sveasoft has much to worry about from OpenWRT's threats.
OpenWRT became possible because Linksys USED GPL-protected code. When they were notified of the fact that they were now part of the GPL, they RELEASED THE CODE, making OpenWRT possible. Sveasoft can't take part in GPL and then not abide to its terms. If they have a problem with that, they can write their own code.
