Skype, Troubled by the GPLv2 License
The famous Skype which develops a highly spread peer-to-peer Internet telephony network and competes against the older existing VoIP protocols such as SIP or IAX is now into some troubles with a German court regarding one of its products.
It seems that Skype’s WSKP100 Linux-based phone, made by SMC and distributed in more places in Europe (Germany included), does not provide access to the source code for every user, even though it is licensed under the GPLv2. According to some Skype officials, the phone now comes with a flyer that gives the users an URL address to the source code. But the court in Germany still considers this insufficient and not in compliance with GPLv2.
However, some sources claim that this is only a minor breach and that it would not affect Skype’s distribution for that phone as it requires only a few changes in the distributing protocol. But there are also some voices who claim that the gpl-violations.org website is taking action against the SMC phone.
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After approximately 6 months of hard work, Willy Tarreau announced the availability of the 2.4.35 Linux kernel. One year ago, Willy Tarreau became the 2.4 branch maintainer and this is his second stable 2.4 kernel release: "I’m very conscious that 2.4 has mostly left desktop PCs and notebooks, but it’s still commonly found on servers, route reflectors or firewalls. For this reason, I’m open to merge the small updates required to maintain such systems running (eg: PCI IDs and such), but I will generally refuse all patches which add support for new desktop or notebook-specific hardware, unless the people present very convincing arguments. Those people generally would better upgrade their systems to 2.6." - stated Willy Tarreau, the 2.4 kernel branch maintainer.
Dell Inc. has recently started gaining some popularity as a company very fond of the Linux operating systems. The story started with Dell’s nice initiative of answering the users who demanded some Linux-based products on IdeaStorm forum. At that time, Dell announced the four Ubuntu-based systems which addressed the open source fans.
Cellular networking and GPS daughtercards… that’s the new offer coming from Gumstix Linux vendor. The daughtercards will be called Goliath and they should work with Gumstix’s single board computer, Verdex (Gumstix being well known as a SBC – single board PC- manufacturer), which is based on Intel’s PXA270 SoC (system-on-chip), one of the most popular mobile phone processors for the Linux-based cellphones.
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