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Shabble was talking about Sveasoft: a company that made their own firmware based on Linksys', but got stroppy when other people starting to distribute their 'fo

Shabble was talking about Sveasoft: a company that made their own firmware based on Linksys', but got stroppy when other people starting to distribute their 'fork'.

rbanffy 15y ago
Oops... Sorry. Now I'm curious. I didn't follow the story. How did it end?
- shabble 15y ago
  Ah, I thought it was reasonably common knowledge, so I didn't elaborate on it. Essentially, Sveasoft (which is/was, iirc, a single guy) took the original Linksys firmware releases, and built some fairly impressive new features on top. His business plan involved selling subscriptions to receive updates on a regular basis, with the sources being made public (beyond the subscribers) after some embargo period. What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code. I'm not sure if (how?) it's ended, but there is still activity on at least one of the anti-sveasoft sites: http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure has a lot of the original stuff, I think. I suspect it's mostly died down because there are now much more viable alternatives (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) than there were at the time, and nobody wants the hassle of dealing with it. It does raise the issue (as mentioned in the licence article this thread is about) of dealing with the GPL on embedded devices, where most of the work is in kernel modules or statically linked binaries. The usual techniques which allow proprietary software to be segregated and interface with GPL code aren't really appropriate, and it's quite difficult to build such a thing. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your perspective, of course.
  - paulhauggis 15y ago
    "What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code." Exactly point point. This is why you can't run a viable business selling GNU software.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      No. That's why, if you want to sell software to your users without giving them the freedoms afforded by the GPL, you'll have to either write your own software from scratch or base it on one that uses a license that allows you to give your users an inferior set of rights.

Shabble was talking about Sveasoft: a company that made their own firmware based on Linksys', but got stroppy when other people starting to distribute their 'fork'.

rbanffy 15y ago

Oops... Sorry. Now I'm curious. I didn't follow the story. How did it end?

shabble 15y ago
Ah, I thought it was reasonably common knowledge, so I didn't elaborate on it. Essentially, Sveasoft (which is/was, iirc, a single guy) took the original Linksys firmware releases, and built some fairly impressive new features on top. His business plan involved selling subscriptions to receive updates on a regular basis, with the sources being made public (beyond the subscribers) after some embargo period. What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code. I'm not sure if (how?) it's ended, but there is still activity on at least one of the anti-sveasoft sites: http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://sveasoft.blogspot.com/ http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/#readingpleasure has a lot of the original stuff, I think. I suspect it's mostly died down because there are now much more viable alternatives (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc) than there were at the time, and nobody wants the hassle of dealing with it. It does raise the issue (as mentioned in the licence article this thread is about) of dealing with the GPL on embedded devices, where most of the work is in kernel modules or statically linked binaries. The usual techniques which allow proprietary software to be segregated and interface with GPL code aren't really appropriate, and it's quite difficult to build such a thing. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your perspective, of course.
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  "What actually happened was that very few people subscribed, and immediately began posting the latest sources publicly (as permitted under the GPL), which resulted in Sveasoft threatening them with legal action, issuing C&Ds to anyone involved, and inserting more and more complicated tracking tokens and other booby-traps in the code." Exactly point point. This is why you can't run a viable business selling GNU software.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    No. That's why, if you want to sell software to your users without giving them the freedoms afforded by the GPL, you'll have to either write your own software from scratch or base it on one that uses a license that allows you to give your users an inferior set of rights.