ASUS Eee PC May Violate GPL, Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act
Submitted by srlinuxx on Fri, 11/23/2007 - 13:08.
The ASUS Eee PC has been getting all manner of attention from various sites around the Internet, but recently an Eee owner has taken ASUS to task over potential violations of the GPL and of the long-standing Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
Programmer Cliff Biffle recently bought himself a Galaxy Black Eee PC as a birthday gift, but in attempting to play with the underlying Xandros Linux operating system, found a few major roadblocks in the form of proprietary hardware and software.
Mr. Biffle decided to disassemble the software -- which is permitted under the GPL -- and found that the asus_acpi kernel module was modified from the Linux 2.6.21.4 version. While the modification itself is permitted, in order to comply with the regulations of the GPL, ASUS has not published their modified sources, retained prior module attribution (name, version, and author) and has apparently stripped all references to "asus_acpi."
When attempting to obtain the modified sources from the ASUS website, Mr. Biffle found that the 1.8GB zipped "source" file on the ASUS page contained only some kernel headers, and a collection of .deb (Debian package) files -- some of which were not even present on the installed Xandros Linux operating system.
ASUS may have lgpl on their codes from Xandros ? Surprise ?
Xandros is Corel and therefore Debian based operating system with their own lgpl license. Some Debian programs may not be released in the initial Suse installed copy of their Linux operating system.
There will be factory hardware changes and software modifications(display resolution) as we speak; so modifications by owners will be at their own risk. Trying to use other Linux operating system needs support from the distro to certify their operating system on ASUS Eee Pc?