Ho Do Android Tablets Score On GPL Compliance?

There seems to be no stopping the current avalanche of Android tablets — just look through the CES announcements for a not-so-small sampling — and that’s undoubtedly a good thing for Linux.

A shadow was recently cast upon that otherwise sunny landscape, however, in the form of a report examining said tablets’ GPL compliance.

“The GPL requires that vendors either provide the source code to the GPL components with the device, or alternatively to provide a written offer to provide the source code upon request,” explained Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) employee and Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett in an introduction to his analysis of today’s Android tablets. “Distributing devices without adhering to the copyright license of the associated software is copyright infringement, and doing so commercially is a criminal act in many countries.”

 Read more of Katherine Noyes’s blog post