Fwd: eCos licensing, GPL and chinese gaming machines

Fwd: eCos licensing, GPL and chinese gaming machines

[Anatoly Verkhovsky]

Hello,  i was not sure where to ask this, so here is my question:

Several chinese companies build and sell portable media players based
on SPMP8000 chipset
(produced by chinese company Sunkong).  It appears that the
application is built on top of eCos
and Redboot, i'm pretty sure application and OS sources are closed source.

Are they in violation of GPL?

I assume these devices are made for internal market, but they do ship
to Europe and US (worldwide).
And there seems to be fair amount of those devices sold that way.

I'm only a curious owner of one such device.

Regards,
AV

Re: Fwd: eCos licensing, GPL and chinese gaming machines

[Jonathan Larmour]

On 02/03/10 21:21, Anatoly Verkhovsky wrote:
> Hello,  i was not sure where to ask this, so here is my question:
> 
> Several chinese companies build and sell portable media players based
> on SPMP8000 chipset
> (produced by chinese company Sunkong).  It appears that the
> application is built on top of eCos
> and Redboot, i'm pretty sure application and OS sources are closed source.
> 
> Are they in violation of GPL?

Have they included a written offer to supply you with the source code?
If not, then they likely are in violation.

It's worth checking through the full documentation, including all the
small print, just in case. If you don't have the full documentation (or
it's in a different language) then it would be hard to pursue.

The following link gives more information:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-violation.html

Jifl