Chinese Tablet Manufacturers breaking the GPLv2 | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Tablet Manufacturers breaking the GPLv2

elpauer.org

57 pointsch0wn22 comments

The author is "surprised" that Chinese manufacturers are not honoring intellectual property licensing terms? What planet does he live on?

Is that a good excuse to just let things slide?

I think he's just making the point that the battle is futile.

I think he is surprised not by the violation, but by the lack of legal action to correct the situation.

It will never stop so why waste the money. Cisco has had their OSs ripped out of their image files and placed onto cheap Chinese switches and routers for over a decade now.

'legal' means something different in China. The government is the rule maker, judge and player.

Several years back, I worked on an embedded product in collaboration with a Chinese company (some of the code was outsourced to them). We stopped working with them when we discovered that much of their code was simply cut'n'paste from various GPL'd codebases. When we asked them about it, they said it was "freely available online" and completely dismissed licensing concerns.

To them, a "license" is just some bytes at the beginning of the file. Delete those bytes, and the license is gone. Problem solved.

>To them, a "license" is just some bytes at the beginning of the file. Delete those bytes, and the license is gone. Problem solved.

To be fair, they're absolutely right. A license is just some bits at the beginning of a file. A license only adds "colour"[1] to the bits if there is some legal protection granted by it. In China, there isn't any. The GPL is only as powerful as the laws establishing the authority of license agreements.

[1]http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Hmm.

The Chinese market is freer than western markets. No artificial government enforced monopolies.

Seriously? China is the foremost present-day example of state capitalism. A quick Google search brings up http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/world/asia/30china.html.

I guess I don't understand what you mean. The US can own a bunch of shares of GM and it's still a free market.

The jet fuel example is infuriating, but it seems more like a monopoly power than some government enforced regulation preventing competition.

I guess i don't see how the state is that different than a kid with a REALLY BIG trust fund - at least up to the point of special laws. The post office is an example i'm familiar with. it's a felony to mess with mail, but not a UPS delivered box. I didn't get the sense that any of these state industries enjoyed special enforcement like that- just that they had really deep pockets. Frankly, not all that different from Goldman Sachs.

From the example you provided "Social-imperialism" might be a better term to describe the behavior.

That depends on what part of China you're talking about.

The simple answer is that pursuing an import ban at the ITC against down market chinese tablets would be an exercise in futility. Unlike major manufacturers that are tied to their brands any no name tablet that pulled a ban would just get a face lift and a new name.

This comment is full of interesting info:

http://www.elpauer.org/?p=1146&cpage=1#comment-101986

Things are in this case a lot better than it seems at first.

Somehow people don't mind Windows being pirated all over in China. How is this different? Everything in China is copied.

That's what no copyright means: pirated commercial software, putting GPL software in proprietary software (that gets copied, too), downloading warez and movies and music. And that's all right!

No GPL developer starves to death because China is ripping his source code all over, similarly to no Western software developer starves to death because anything from Windows to Photoshop to games to $younameit is copied around in China.

Software isn't written to suck up money via any half-imaginable channel. Software is written either because it's fun or that there's someone who ends up paying enough so that the development becomes feasible.

Crying out for the loss of income if only the Chinese had bought original copies of the programs would be akin to MAFIAA crying out loud for the loss of income if only everyone who pirated a song would've bought the damn album otherwise.

GPL is a good weapon in Western countries because in the west these companies also actively go against pirating their software and content.

Huh?

Nobody is crying about loss of income. People taking GPL:d software and using it in closed products represents a loss of freedom, for the people using said products.

If I read it right, he's satirizing the people who think copyright should be abolished.

This is silly. Without copyright, licenses like the GPL don't have teeth and cannot be enforced.

Neither the FSF nor Apple have standing to get the injunction enforced. Though it might be interesting for Apple to contribute to Linux in order to be able to do exactly this.

Maybe when the Linux toolchain is LLVM instead of gcc...

LLVM is licensed under the UI license, which is basically the BSD license. The only part that is GPL in LLVM is some C/C++ code derived from GCC.

That would be enough, but I doubt tablets come with C/C++ compilers.

I've had products produced in China. They remind me of that honey badger video. If you have money they will do whatever you want. I was shocked at the ease with which I could contact one of their companies and request that they change and rebrand some of their own proprietary products for me to sell, and they complied without blinking for what, in my mind, was a fairly low amount of $$$. I can't imagine US companies even contemplating that without practically owning the results.

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