Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 25th Nov 2007 23:05 UTC, submitted by jello
Members of the Linux community have complained that the hot new sub-notebook from Asus, the eeePC, may have violated the spirit of the Linux General Public License. Some Linux advocates claim the eeePC has not included required source code with the installed Xandros Linux distribution and does not easily enable users to install another distro. However, there are indications that eeePC fans probably don't care.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
I'm glad folks like you and Priest are out there with the voice of reason. There were hundreds of zealots on Slashdot who jumped on the "boycott ASUS" bandwagon with this. Only a relative few were insightful enough to say the obvious, which is that ASUS hasn't yet violated the GPL. Just because nearly every OSS developer out there automatically ships or overtly offers for download the source to their project doesn't mean they explicitly have to. As you both said, "make available upon request" is the only requirement.
I wonder if any of the accusers have bothered to email, call or snail mail ASUS and request the source? I doubt it, but unless that happened and ASUS flat out said "no", there's really no reason to get upset at the present time.
EDIT: According to bremac's post below, it was requested and not provided. I'm still going to wait on the sidelines and see what happens here. There's no need in my mind to jump to any conclusions until more is known. I'm sincerely hoping ASUS does the right thing though; it would be a shame for such a nice piece of hardware to go away because of a stupid mistake.
Edited 2007-11-26 00:09