Am 24.10.2013 16:56, schrieb James Hilliard: > The Chinese ZTE company appears to be ignoring GPL requirements in > numerous markets especially in Europe. They appear to manufacture > numerous routers/DSL modems that use the linux kernel and they do not > distribute any source code for anything as far as I can tell or provide > any GPL written offers. I have done an analysis of some of their DSL > modems that all appear to be using the Linux kernel and likely other GPL > code. When contacted they appear uncooperative in fixing this issue but > admit that the routers use Linux.
Oh great, I mean the case of ZTE :( But this is something that is pretty common for Chinese hardware makers - look at all those cheap Android devices floating around. For most of them you do not get anything and I am almost sure that most even run without proper licensing of the multi media codecs too. It is pretty hard to enforce this. Within China you have basically no chance. Within a western country the best thing one could do is to threaten the maker with an import embargo. This could be achieved when the issue is taken to the local offcials dealing with "intellectual property rights". But this has only seldomly been done, as far as I know. And for all the small makers it would not help either - once you achieved one embargo they will simply switch the brand/name/model and off they go again - been there, seen that. For a large company like ZTE that wants to get more ground in western countries now (which used to be a China/Asia only brand) this could though be a little different case. But yes, this really aggravates me too for some time, that Asian manufacturers basically ignore most of it, making a business from it and thus have an unfair competetive advantage compared to western makers that (have to) respect it. Cheers nils
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