You are right. But I bought one knowingly and it works well.
Microsoft has been a horrible, anti competitor company built on unethical values yet I chose their Office 365 in my company. Many here use their products and take a salary from such a company.
Google has left the “don’t be evil” in the dust, with anti competitive measures and short changing employees. Hardly ethical, yet widely used in this crowd, and many here choose to draw a salary from them.
I hate the Castro brothers and what it does to Cuban people, but I do smoke a cigar now and then.
I hate Nestle, but have a Nespresso.
I hate Big Oil but drive an ICE as is only viable option.
And so on.
My point is both parts are right. Companies can un unethical or illegal things, we can stay away from their products out of principles, or cave in out of (a) having no principles or (b) being practical.
In reality I think we all cave in a bit (even Stallman and co), so virtue signaling for choosing the hard path sometimes feels hypocrital.
If your principles are such that you won’t buy a product due to a realistically immaterial instance of a GPL violation, sure. Given the number of GPL violations in the wild I refuse to believe that anyone but the most Stallman-esque among us are living to this standard.
It's not immaterial, it's literally the point of the GPL. If they don't want to release their modifications they shouldn't take advantage of the huge effort that went into the linux kernel. Maybe use a different OS and license it..
Fair enough. Everybody can try to create their own community with their own rules. You seem to have decided that you prefer a community that doesn't adhere to licensing agreements. Don't be surprised if other communities exclude you.
I can understand not being ideologically aligned with Stallman and Co.
I also agree that there must be lots of violations of the GPL out there. Software is often invisible.
That said, I don’t think there’s many big companies out there openly doing it. If get caught, they comply with the minimum effort possible, but they comply. I don’t see them being blatant or cavalier about it.
Two main reasons for me to avoid them:
1. The attitude makes them untrustworthy. If they are blatantly violating this, what else are they willing to ignore? They have obligations towards me as a consumer, for example. Will they respect those? Will they sale my data to others?
2. There’s no guarantee that they will continue being able to operate in my country. A judge could theoretically force them to close shop. So I’d rather not put my data on their product.
Imagine if we treated copyright material like this.
"You bought tickets to Avatar 2? Given the number of pirated copies online, I refuse to believe that anyone but the idiots among us are willing to pay for content."
That feels like the start of talking past each other here heh. GP is making a values statement. If a good product gets to be exempt from the values in someone’s value system, then any product is.
More likely here following the law in this instance isn’t part of your value system, and neither is free/libre software being used on its authors’ terms, so you are (internally) free to decide to buy something even if it doesn’t adhere to the GPL. If I’m right about that, adherence to these things is a (maybe very-)nice-to-have rather than a core value, whereas the GP I think is coming from a place where one of those is a core value.
> Unfortunately Onyx Boox offers one of a kind products which its competitors don't really come close.
I wonder if absent the Linux kernel they be capable of offering a one of a kind product? It would be more accurate here to say that if they could keep their code proprietary that would be nice for them, but unfortunately the Linux kernel offers them a one of a kind base to build a product on and so they need to take the compromise and release their modifications as GPL if they want to be able to build a good product.
What makes the Boox tablets unique isn't their Linux kernel, it's their customizations to Android to make the UI more usable on a slow e-Ink display. They could release their kernel sources to comply with the GPL and still keep their Android skin to themselves, just like every other Android device manufacturer does.
Remarkable 2 can't even run Android apps, the main selling point of Onyx Boox. You can't read Kindle book, Libby, whatever service your local library use, etc.
