[Discuss] Ubiquiti Networks is creatively violating the GPL

Wed Apr 8 14:23:47 EDT 2015

I contacted Riley to see if he's brought this to the FSF or Software
Freedom Conservancy for help.

It's good to ask people politely to comply with the law; and good to out
them when they persistently refuse.

Greg Rundlett
http://eQuality-Tech.com
http://freephile.org

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've mentioned Ubiquiti Networks's products on the list here a few
> times, and have since purchased some of their hardware. Disappointingly
> I read the posting below.
>  -Tom
>
>
> Four ways Ubiquiti Networks is creatively violating the GPL
> http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/
>
>   ...they have been violating the GPL. However, because they did it
>   creatively, most people don't know about it, and Ubiquiti still hasn't
>   come into compliance.
>   ...
>   [They refuse] to provide the source to their modified bootloader, even
>   though they made changes that introduced security vulnerabilities.
>   ...
>   It would be natural to think that the binaries that Ubiquiti provides
>   were compiled from the source code that Ubiquti provides. As it turns
>   out, for a large number of their releases, the kernel source given
>   does not correspond to the kernel in the official firmware images.
>   ...
>   It's possible that this was just a mistake, but remember that people
>   have complained about this without much of a response.
>   ...
>   ...I have been trying to contact Ubiquiti for the past year about the
>   issue of the u-boot source code. ...  In fact, I even got a copyright
>   holder of u-boot to ask for the source, and they still haven't
>   provided it.
>
>   From my conversations with Ubiquiti, I have found that they claimed
>   that it's alright to refuse to provide source code to GPL-licensed
>   software if "This decision was taken with the security of the users in
>   mind".
>
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