[OpenWrt-Devel] GPL Violation to chase + Engenius/Senao firmware non-update

Michael Holstein moholstein at gmail.com
Fri Aug 24 10:59:42 EDT 2018


>GPL enforcement in court is seen by some as ineffective, an at-arms-length approach is not what makes FOSS strong and fits more closed source practices. LWN had a nice article on that in 2016 "The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement" [1].
> As Engenius/Senao clearly already for a long time bases its product on (quite old) versions of OpenWrt (and LUCI !), it shouldn't be impossible to convince this company to be more cooperative; arguing that it would obviously be in their own benefit seems not to far fetched.

Yeah, but I've been in federal court doing e-discovery beat down
enough times to know this is how the war of attrition is fought. Pro
se is $400. e-discovery $300/hr for their expert, knowing district
court isn't about winning the trial, it's knowing how to survive
standing and venue, and then get through discovery .. plus  judge
figures "poor random joe vs fancy pants lawyer .. give random a break
eh?" .. it's winnable. I've defended a bunch of them for employers, 15
years worth

Anyway .. that legal BS aside and cracking the nut that matters ..

I've made some progress on it ... by exploiting a bug in an old
version of their firmware. Same trick Cydia (et.al.) always use on
iOS.
so there will be an upgrade path. Firmware isn't auto-updating and
downgrade permitted (at the moment) and unsure as to why they'd care
at
all aside from license agreements and import restrictions (Qualcomm
being somewhat infamous for NDAs).

This would be a packaged OTA upgrade from the UI like it is on usual
ones. Don't hound me though this isn't my day job.

Which, while we're at it, I'm in there far enough that if anyone if
familiar with clean room and wants to do the other half I will write
the spec.

-Mike.

> all the stuff I shouldn't have top-posted prior now gone :)
> thanks for pointing that out Piotr

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