[ILUG] FortiOS & Linux

[Paul Jakma]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, Daniel Goldsmith wrote:

> In this case, the only piece they were sued on was initrd, whose
> developer, Harald Welte, is one of the founders of gpl-violations.

according to Harald, Rusty Russel is the developer. Harald is the 
copyright owner (Rusty assigned it to him specifically so Harald 
could sue - Harald's dad is a lawyer iirc).

Read what kevin wrote.

> IMO, gpl-violations made a tactical error in not including this 
> info in their own press release. The lack of any reference to it 
> makes them seem like zealots, pushing the greater picture to the 
> detriment of a legal argument which they have already won.

WTF are you smoking?

Never mind zealots, the point is that Fortinet, like many other 
embedded-linux-box makers *wilfully* (if it gets to court, it means 
the vendor has disregarded /many/ attempts by users and copyright 
holders to politely get them to reform) have been taking vast swathes 
of code they have no licence to and profiting from it. So when one of 
the stakeholders in those vast swathes of code sues them - good for 
them.

Taking and redistributing copyrighted material without licence to do 
so is called "piracy" and "stealing" by many other corporate entities 
- has become fashionable usage anyway.

Harald btw usually sues based on his copyrights in much of the 
Netfilter code. This time he's sueing based on initrd (written by 
Rusty, the original Netfilter author..).

Anyway, yeah, you really have to sorry for those poor corporations 
who rip-off GPL code and then get sued by zealots.

Now if you could be so good as to stop hogging the pipe.. pass it on 
dude.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.