Hi Hugo,

There are a few points of GPL compliance I'm told that Empeg is falling down on, although I don't have proof yet. You can no doubt confirm or deny them for me. I am copyright holder for a good bit of Debian code and am assuming I have direct rights here as well as the rights of people I represent who have complained to me. In enforcing my license I'm not attempting to be a "zealot". Having people obey your software license, especially one as fair as the GPL, is a pretty basic right and one that Empeg exercises as well.

1. Is the complete text of all licenses for any free software in the product delivered to the customer along with the software? If the license is on a disk rather than in printed form, does the printed documentation say where to find it and that the customer has some special rights under those licenses?

2. If you do not distribute the machine-readable source code with the unit, you must accompany the unit with a written offer to give all GPL source code for binary code in the unit to _any_ third party. Not just your customers, anyone. This is verbatim from the GPL 3(a) and 3(b).

We know your intentions are good so please _fix_ this stuff if it is happening and tell us right away that you are doing so.

By the way, you mentioned "Nobody is going after LinuxOne". That's not so. I know one person who has hired an attorney and their underwriter has put their IPO on long-term hold while they fix problems that have been reported widely in the press. This is at least in part due to my efforts. I wouldn't _dream_ of doing something like that with you, you're just making a paperwork mistake while they had serious bad intent.

Thanks

Bruce Perens