SFLC will love the 7th Circuit

[Chris DiBona]

Actually, you're mixing up earth (where the issue is that Richard
wants the imagery that we ourselves do not own) and the google search
appliance. I invite you to go mess with the mirror on code.google.com,
and not confuse the gplv3 and gplv2 wrt replacability.

Chris

On Oct 15, 2007 9:47 AM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Alexander Terekhov [mailto:alexander.terekhov at gmail.com] wrote:
> > > Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.
> >
> > http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/transcript_
> > richard_stallman_honary_degree_speech_pavia_2007
> >
> > "Google designs software specifically to restrict the user. That's the
> > nature of the Google Earth client: it is made the way it is
> > specifically to restrict the people who use it. Obviously, it's not
> > Free Software, because Free Software develops under the democratic
> > control of its users."
>
> Do you know which OS the Google Box integrates? You know this kind of black
> box sold at expensive price, with a licence that does not allow any access
> to its kernel, because it is preconfigured by Google, updated remotely by
> Google, and controllable only through a web interface (it is preconfigured
> to use DHCP so that it becomes accessible from your private LAN, and it is
> used to index your documents in your private network and optionally act as a
> gateway for the Internet from which it receives its updates).
>
> The licence is extremely restrictive, and if you ever attempt to connect to
> it with something else than its web interface, you'll need some secret
> password or protocol.
>
> But if someone has bought it, then opened the box to extract its harddisk,
> I'm nearly sure you'll get a disk full on encrypted data, that is decrypted
> by its ROM and a key stored in some secure device on its motherboard. But
> with some electronics, you could still get some decrypted data and save a
> dump. Does it use some free software in it? Or is it based on a BSD-like
> kernel built by Google?
>
> Does Google respect the copyright and licences of the embedded software if
> this is the case? (Google can't pretend that the software is unaccessible if
> it can be updated remotely by Google).
>
> Now if this embedded kernel was compiled with GCC and linked with GNU C
> libraries, what is happening to the licencing terms for the whole "Google
> Box" kernel, wouldn't it have to be licenced under the GPL too with its
> sources?
>
>
>
>



-- 
Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.
Google's Open Source program can be found at http://code.google.com
Personal Weblog: http://dibona.com