Linksys Access Point breaks GPL?
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By adamb, Section News Posted on Wed Jul 30th, 2003 at 07:57:03 GMT
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O'Reilly's sysadmin and community wireless champion Rob Flickenger has blogged details of suspicious findings on firmware of the Linksys WRT54G wireless access point.
"Now that we are able to execute arbitrary commands on the WRT54G, it is obvious that Linksys is running modified software covered by the GPL. One perfect example of this is Zebra, the advanced dynamic routing software package. By opening the firmware file directly, as well as by making queries through the makeshift ping interface mentioned earlier, we noticed that the zebra running on the WRT54G doesn't use the standard configuration file locations. This means that it must certainly be a modified binary.
So, naturally curious, I wanted to find out what Linksys had to do to get Zebra running on this hardware. I stopped by the Linksys "GPL Code Center", and downloaded their zebra archive.
You can imagine my disappointment when I realized that this is in fact just a copy of the original source code available from zebra.org. Where are the changes to the source tree? I have just asked Linksys that very question, but as they still haven't gotten back to my first query, I expect my email to be filed under irrelevant and forgotten."
Rob's email to Linksys asking to obtain the source of the code is archived on the NoCat mailing list.
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