Using shadowsocks to replace OpenVPN setup

[RMerlin]

What bothers me is the lack of GPL compliance.

 

[stfn]

What bothers me is the lack of GPL compliance.

I assume you are talking about the koolshare fork? I completely understand your frustration with this behaviour. Even though I don't know anything about what it takes to comply with the GPL, all I can say from my personal experience: that's such a Chinese thing. Most of these guys are simply oblivious or see no point in complying. Or they don't speak English so they could understand what GPL is in the first place. Or can't be bothered.

Why am I telling you this? Because I am well aware of the problem and lived in China long enough to understand that this kind of behaviour will not go away in the near future. Hey, at least, from what I can tell, they give you credit for your work.

But all this misses the point: if you want me to stop 'promoting' their fork on the forums, I will. I have a very pragmatic, unemotional take on this since I only have to worry about my personal outcome. But I completely understand and respect your position.

 

[kvic]

I think I saw the code in github the other day.

btw, RMerlin, I thought you don't have time for GPL..lol

 

[RMerlin]

One of the koolshare devs used to publish his code to Github a few years ago, back when he first forked away from my code. He stopped updating his repo one or two years ago, and I had assumed he had stopped development, until I saw your post. I'm not annoyed for legal or ideological reasons - (I'm more a follower of Torvalds than Stallman when it comes to open source code). I'm annoyed because these guys take my work (and that of everyone else contributing to the original code, which includes the Tomato devs and Asus, among many others), and they don't give back a single line of code to the community.

And there's also the more serious legal issues of allowing to run proprietary products on non-licensed devices, i.e. offering AiCloud or AiProtection on a non-Asus router.

I won't ask you not to discuss it on the forums - you're still free to do so. I will simply have the same stance as I took with Xvortex, another fork developer who doesn't follow the GPL requirements: I will acknowledge their existence, however I won't provide any support to its users, and won't recommend people to use it either. I would just ask you not to provide any download links on SNBForums (because that could legally put SNBForums - and yourself - into a potential grey area from a legal point of view.)

Following the GPL requirements would be dead simple: all they have to do is provide the source code to any change they did to the GPL code, and provide a way for anyone to recompile their firmware out of that code. If they still use a git repo, just make that repo public, otherwise provide tarballs containing the code. Aside from allowing the original developers to get back code for their own upstream work, it would also appease the mind of people about what they are actually running. Because let's face it, a router is a pretty dangerous place to run code coming from an unknown source, who seems to want to hide from you the actual content of that firmware.

 

[RMerlin]

I think I saw the code in github the other day.

He hasn't updated it since 2014 or 2015, unless there's another repo I haven't seen.

btw, RMerlin, I thought you don't have time for GPL..lol

I don't have time to go chasing people breaking the licence and harassing them into compliance. That does not mean however that I am OK with it.

 

[stfn]

https://github.com/koolshare/koolshare.github.io

Last commit 2 days ago.
Am I missing something?

 

[RMerlin]

https://github.com/koolshare/koolshare.github.io

Last commit 2 days ago.
Am I missing something?

I was referring to their forks of my firmware, from the link in post #36.