Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Sitecom GmbH makes some sort of router/firewall product that is based on netfilter/iptables. Thats all well and good but they apparently havent read the GPL and have not complied with releasing source code and distrubuting FOR FREE any products BASED ON other GPL products. Doh!

The BASED ON part is important because this is where people get confused and think the GPL "infects" software. You can write your own stuff AROUND some piece of GPL code and keep your code separate and you dont have to GPL any of your separate stuff, but once you "whole or in part" make something that "contains or is derived from" a GPL source then you must GPL that new something that contains the GPL item it is comprised of or derived from. Its really not restrictive at ALL. Its just saying if you want to use this code go ahead, but if you use it either in part or entirety in another piece of code, then you have to keep this open license. You can use GPL stuff all day long and write proprietary code right with it, so long as they are separate entities and linked together as such so that they can be distributed that way. And its not that difficult to do that.

Basic understanding aside the folks at Sitecom just plain refused to comply when they released their product entirely based on netfilter/iptables. So the netfilter team took em to court and won an injunction.

See the linked article at the netfilter site for more details.   netfilter project was granted a preliminary injunction against Sitecom GmbH