On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 5:35 AM, Nils Faerber <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 > > Instead of banning the product they just need to ban the company / plant where the product is made. This is what they should do if they really want to fix the problems with Chinese goods in compliance or quality.
