Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling Firmware Updates

Re:Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling ... by anmorgan on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @08:42AM (#15071771)

Is running software/application in the Linux environment deem it a derivative work? Does Honeywell have to adhere to a GPL if they aren't modifying the Linux kernel?

It's not clear to me that they would need to follow GPL.

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Re:Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling ... by cnorthwood on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @09:03AM (#15071920)

Yes, the licensing terms are on distribution, not on modification. They have to provide the source, even if it's not been modified.

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Re:Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling ... by michaelt on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @09:07AM (#15071956)

They have to provide the source for the kernel and whatnot - but if the interesting stuff is in userspace applications which aren't derivatives of copyleft code, they don't have to provide the source for _those_

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Re:Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling ... by kogepathic on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @09:21AM (#15072071)

> but if the interesting stuff is in userspace applications which aren't derivatives of copyleft code

Of course. Honeywell can run their own proprietary applications on top of a Linux/GNU system. I didn't mean to imply that you could request the source code to every program running on the device.

However they need to provide the source code for any GPL licensed portions. IIRC they should also provide build scripts so you can create a firmware image yourself.

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Re:Reverse Engineering My Home Security System: Decompiling ... by qb45 on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @10:12AM (#15072563)

GPL only requires providing build scripts for GPL software. In this case it means they can't strip kernel makefiles from the kernel source to make it harder to build independently.

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