Tuesday 9 November 2010

Does the 8320HD violate the GPL?

For those not in the know, the GNU General Public License (GPL) means that if you ship binaries that are covered by the GPL, you must also supply the source code (whether you modified the code or not, though if you didn't modify it, just providing a URL to the original unmodified source code is good enough). The 8320HD firmware contains LGPL 'ed and GPL'ed software in its firmware - see the "Legal Information" dialogue box in its UI.

The huge Australian ISP Telstra has been supplying near-identical "T-Box" hardware (the only difference between a T-Box and an 8320HD is the latter's use of DVB-T2 tuners instead of the T-Box's DVB-T tuners - both have their firmware written by Netgem). This week, Telstra has been pulled up for not supplying source code to the GPL'ed software in their T-Box firmware.

Telstra, to their credit, have managed to persuade Netgem to release the October 2010 source code to their T-Box firmware. The question now remains: when will Netgem release the equivalent 8320HD source code? Surely IP Vision remains in GPL violation until they do?

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