Re: >> http://lkml.org/archive/2003/2/7/55/index.html

People should organise a boycott of their products is the best start,

Couldn't work. Specialist company, specialist customers. When I need Acorn or Iyonix products, I go to Castle (or one of their dealers).

hitting what appears to be a fairly small company in the wallet will hurt them quite quickly (maybe we should make make local risc os user groups aware of this) so dissuading any customers would be a good start.

You really want to hurt a small British company designing and making remarkably innovative British goods (as far as this is possible nowadays) in competition with the overwhelming Microsoft market? This company needs your support, not your boycott.

A. be encouraged to GPL *all* of the code in question.

Agreed: it seems to me the code is useless to anyone else, it will only run on Castle hardware anyway. It would therefore seem that releasing the source would be an easy solution to the problem. Unfortunately it probably includes sections licensed from elsewhere and those people would complain. Maybe they can isolate the sections.

B. be encouraged to remove all disputed code and rewrite using BSD style/licensed sources.

Yes, it sounds (I know nothing of what has actually happened) as if this is what they ought to have done in the first place, and it would have been as easy and much better. Sounds as if they have made a mistake. Sounds as if correcting this will cost a small innovative British company a good bit of money and produce no winners, except that it will make a point (to use BSD and not Linux). Their mistake (to have used Linux source and not BSD) does not seem to me to have many victims. Except themselves, if the GPL community takes action.

Conclusion: BSD is the only software that is really free in every sense of the word.