Re: Debian-based miniVDR violates GPL (FYI)
Hi Josephine
On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 10:43:40AM +0200, Ciuca, Josephine wrote:
> Hello
>
> I just wanted to let you know about a GPL violation in the distribution
> miniVDR, a distribution based on Depian with so-called GPL licensed
> patches (www.minivdr.de). They refuse to share the sources and are
> willing to give them only for 15euros, which is way abusive and does not
> reflect the price of media and cd-burner usage. They constantly refused
> to share the sources on Sourceforge or any other OSS promoting service
> and even mailed me "the harddisk is broken, so no sources anymore". I
> have mails from the maintainer of the distribution where he stated I
> only get the sources for 15eur and if I think it's expensive, I should
> use other distribution. This is abusive usage of the GPL code. Please
> let me know if I should forward these mails too or if you need anything.
Personally I have no idea if they can get away with this or not, I'd
hope not but that's just my opinion.
Debian has no formal way of fighting abuses as far as I know, but
there is a Debian lawyer so maybe I'm wrong. However I'm sure if you
raise the issue with the Free Software Foundation's [1]GPL Compliance
Lab they will know exactly what to do an how to handle this.
So unless someone else here knows better what to do this is probably
the best thing to do. Altho maybe it should be raised with
debian-legal@lists.debian.org first?
Regards
Floris
[1] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliance.html
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