---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <[email protected]> To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 15:26:27 +0000 Subject: Re: Use of GNU GPL 2.0 code in Mikrotik RBXXX series and others On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thus, what concerns me here most is that there are accusations going > back to 2008 on this mailing list that Mikrotik's source code is not > complete, it's slightly more complex than it first seems. mikrotik's success comes from their "remote management" system which is similar in a way to cisco router management system. to achieve this, mikrotik *heavily modified* the underlying commands. by that i mean that when you ssh or telnet into a mikrotik router, instead of the "/bin/route" command having parameters that you would type on the command-line, they MODIFIED /BIN/ROUTE so that it takes parameters in BINARY FORM ON STDIN. something to that effect, anyway. and they've done this across the *ENTIRE* command-set [*1] so in other words they have a complete binary command-protocol on top of a heavily-modified normal and standard GNU/Linux command set, covering ifconfig, iwconfig, route, management of files in /etc and so on. PART of that is PROPRIETARY. PART of that is obviously GPL'd and other free software licensed software. the last time i checked (which admittedly was back in 2005 when i was investigating reverse-engineering their binary command protocol as a way to easily manage thousands of mikrotik routers) they were reasonably GPL-compliant. i found the source code. it was great... .... but of course it was completely useless, because without the proprietary applications (none of which they were required to release to anybody) the entire GPL'd codebase that they'd modified was completely irrelevant. just fyi. l. [1] openwrt does this is a much more sane manner!
