Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Internet telephony provider Skype has been convicted of violating the open source GPL (General Public License) in a German court. However, the Luxemburg based company was pinged for one of the products it sells on its website rather than its popular peer-to-peer VoIP and IM service.
It appears that Skype was convicted for selling a
VoIP phone, the SMCWSKP 100, made by SMC Networks, which uses the Linux
kernel, without also supplying the source code, which is a prerequisite
of GPLv2.
Skype apparently tried to rectify its mistake by providing a pamphlet
with the packaging that provided a URL to where the source code could
be obtained. However, that was not enough to satisfy the open source
purists that brought the matter to the attention of the German court
nor the court itself.
Summaries of the proceedings can be found here and here - translations
from German to English over the net are a bit dicey but the gist of the
matter is reasonably clear if you use Alta Vista's Babelfish.
In short, anyone who sells a Linux-based product must provide the
source code with the product or face the consequences in the country in
which it is sold. At least that's the case in Germany.
Exactly what punishment Skype can expect to suffer for its transgression, however, is not exactly clear.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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