Home

E3 GNU GPL compliance

Amstrad announced that the Amstrad E3 uses MontaVista’s Linux. Amstrad’s use of Linux means they have obligations under Linux’s license, the GNU GPL.

One of these obligations is that a written offer to provide the source code covered by the GPL must accompany the program, 3(b). Amstrad now state that the written offer is received after the user has run the program and successfully registered the E3 with Amstrad. It arrives as part of the content of the ‘welcome email’ that they send to the newly registered email address. If you’ve got a welcome email from Amstrad it would be useful if you could forward it onto me whether it contains the written offer or not.

E3 LINUX KERNEL

Under the GNU GPL (see www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html), E3 owners 
and third parties are entitled to the source code of the Linux 
Kernel in the product. Should you wish to obtain this, please send 
a cheque for £25 payable to Amserve Ltd (to cover administration
and distribution costs) to Amserve Support, Brentwood House, 
169 Kings Road, Brentwood, Essex CM14 4EF. This offer is valid for 
three years.

If you’ve progressed past this and obtained a release of the complete source code used to produce the GPL’d parts of a particular version of the E3’s firmware please let me know. Note, I don’t mean the MontaVista development kit that Amstrad were initially pointing people to, but For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

Lastly, if you’ve had any dealings with Amstrad regarding their license compliance I’d like to hear how you got on.

The sibling page on the Emailer Plus, or E2, has some information that may be applicable to the E3.


$Revision: 1.3 $

Valid HTML 4.01