13 Companies at CeBIT receive warning letter regarding their alleged GPL incompliance
Some 13 vendors of commercial software and appliance products present at CeBIT receive an open warning letter against their alleged misuse of GPL licensed software. Those warning letters will be personally handed over to the respective companies at their CeBIT booth by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.
The list of companies includes high-profile names of the computing industry, such as Motorola, Acer, AOpen, and continues with Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware.
"While the Free and Open Source community is very happy to see more and more vendors adopt Linux and other GPL-licensed software, it is of great importance that those vendors comply with the respective license conditions, just like with any other software" states Mr. Welte.
"The warning notice gives them a chance to fix their products, before someone might get them into legal troubles", he continues.
About the gpl-violations.org project
For more than one year, the gpl-violations.org project tries to bring vendors who use GPL licensed software in their products into license compliance. To achieve this goal, it uses a number of measures, ranging from warning letters over public documentation of GPL violations, up to legal proceedings. In this year, the project managed to conclude more than 25 amicable agreements, two preliminary injunctions and one court order.