Asus EEE PC "breaks GPL" claim
ASUS may well be in hot water with the Linux community after its latest sub-notebook is alleged to have violated the Linux General Public License (GPL).
Apparently, the EEE PC has not included required source code with the installed Xandros Linux distribution and does not easily let people install another distro. This is enough to get a GPL fan all red under the collar.
The Asus EEE PC is being seen as a 'breakthrough product' that has finally got Linux into the mass consumer market.
But it has created a religious problem for Linux purists who insist that everything must be done by the book.
As it is, the EEE PC is suspect because it uses Xandros, a Debian-based distribution which charges licence fees and was one of the outfits which has signed a deal with Microsoft.
But it appears that the EEE PC also changed a particular module of the underlying Linux kernel concerned with managing the hardware interfaces so that it worked with the computer better.
Writing in his bog, Java developer Cliff Biffle said that this was fine, but Asus appears not to have followed the rules required by the GPL when making such modifications.
He said that it should have distributed the source code for the modified module, attributed the changes to an author and given the new module a version number or name.
Biffle said that Asus attempted to hide what it was doing by removing all references to asus-apc.
Asus' source code archive does not contain the actual source code for the version of Xandros running on the eeePC which is considered naughty under the GPL.
That 1.8GB zip file on the Asus site which claims to be the sources for the code just contains a few .debs files and not even the ones that ship with the machine, Biffle claims.
More here. µ
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Am i the only one that thinks this is clearly FUD?
...the industry should focus on real UNIXes like those derived from BSD. The GNU/GPL stuff is just a way to ask more money from any business and let lawyers earn money to sue everyone. 
Wasn't opensource supposed to save the world from burocracy, DRM and such ? It surely doesn't seem the case, does it ?
Is the Open Source (purist-branch) getting hot under the collar because one module was modified, and asus didn't document it?

Doesn't it make more sense to look at which module was modified, reverse-engineer asus' mods, then upload the stinking module to a bittorrent site?

Geez, people, show a little creativity.

I know asus is not complying technically with the GPL. OK, point made. Now, what are you going to do about it?

This is much less interesting than the bloke who got Mac OS X to run on the eee.
Jorg,

"GNU/GPL stuff is just a way to ask more money from any business and let lawyers earn money to sue everyone"

Umm... right.

The GPL is very clear. If you want to use and distribute modified GPL code, you have to release the source to the modifications for free.

Strangely enough, there is similar wording in other semi-open source licenses, except then the software manufacturer gets to use it without having to publish the source.

You are basically complaining that Linux developers expect people to live by the terms of the GPL for GPL code they use.

Fairness requires that then you should also complain that MS charges for Windows.

ASUS was welcome to choose BSD, but they chose Linux. BSD is a fine system, but it does tend to run behind Linux in development of drivers and new features.

I still don't understand why you'd be complaining that GPL authors require people to live up to GPL licensing terms
It's not a "religious" issue, it's a legal one. You know, copyright law and all that? Asus have had their knuckles rapped over this sort of thing before, and they've come clean, they'll probably do the same again.
...Of course, the title is in scare quotes because the GPL is /not/ hard, and explicit even in its new, confusing, Web 3.0 incarnation.

The problem is that many of these appliance vendors, Asus included, can't keep engineering in sync with marketing and the various teams involved in vetting and publishing content (such as source code) for 'publication.'

It's very clear that these guys *would* be better-served with BSD, simply because it would decouple the bureacratic problem from shipping the hardware. In fact, BSD would be a great way for them to vet their publication and auditing mechanisms for robustness before picking up the GPL.

So... why not? Well, for a hardware vendor like Asus, which is probably smart enough to make a business model out of hardware instead of out of selling devkits, it comes down to the simple, stupid, obvious thing:

Linux, the forcibly open platform, has all the proprietary plugins.

What's sadder? The plugin market is down to two vendors: Adobe for Flash and PDF, Sun for Java. Someone might still care about Real, but that's it. Java even almost works on BSD, if you pick the right one on a good day, so Flash is the holdup.

...and a browser appliance without Flash is a browser appliance without YouTube or MySpace or any of a dozen other sites; given the popularity of the format, it would be a browser without half the Internet.

It's unclear why, exactly, Macromedia and now Adobe have shied from the free BSDs (OS X doesn't count, it's a different display model and a different userland) -- they have a working plugin for Linux/X11, and it's the same browser and X server everywhere else. Presumably there are "too many," not enough apparent demand, and myths about a constantly-breaking userland, but the reality is that most BSD's ABIs are now much less volatile than Linux's, and if Adobe would cough up something -- anything -- native, the community would surely meet them halfway. 

FreeBSD still supports OSF/1 and IRIX compatibility, ferchrissakes. Its downfall may be that it also supports Linux compatibility -- but since the Linux ABI *is* a moving target, only a large subset is ever working, and nobody may know about new breakage until after it happens. If Adobe would target a known quantity in BSD-land (let's say FreeBSD, even if it's not the first choice for embedding, since it's the basis of the well-received DesktopBSD and still plenty small enough for the EEE) and announce when they're making changes, it should be relatively trivial for all the other flavors to keep it running stably. There'll still be grumbing, sure, but at least it'll *work* -- and more than well enough for an embedded product, where the OS will stay frozen anyway.