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Re: Debian-based miniVDR violates GPL (FYI)



On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 11:33:15AM +0100, Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
> 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?

I believe SPI may be more appropriate in this case, not sure though, as they
seem to be germany-based.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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