Potential license violation
Hey there, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to report a potential SOF license violation.
A person by the name CoolStar (aka starplayer132 and coolstarorg) is a developer in the custom Chromebook modding scene who creates drivers for Chromebooks running Windows 10/11. They sell SOF drivers for $10. However, when the driver is decompiled/deobfuscated using a reverse engineering program called Ghidra, the strings in the binary are identical to the ones in the Linux driver.
Here is a function from the Linux driver found in the Windows one:
The issue is that this SOF-based driver is closed source and, most importantly, paid, which completely violates the GPL license the original driver is using. Only about 15% of this code is their own property if you exclude the DRM inserted to paywall users from a simple audio driver.
The following links are links to CoolStar's websites. https://coolstar.org/chromebook/ https://github.com/coolstar https://www.reddit.com/user/coolstarorg
Thank you for your time. Have a good day. You can contact me from this email, meghann6@proton.me.
On 5/15/23 10:00, ryan wrote:
Hey there, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to report a potential SOF license violation.
A person by the name CoolStar (aka starplayer132 and coolstarorg) is a developer in the custom Chromebook modding scene who creates drivers for Chromebooks running Windows 10/11. They sell SOF drivers for $10. However, when the driver is decompiled/deobfuscated using a reverse engineering program called Ghidra, the strings in the binary are identical to the ones in the Linux driver.
Here is a function from the Linux driver found in the Windows one:
The issue is that this SOF-based driver is closed source and, most importantly, paid, which completely violates the GPL license the original driver is using. Only about 15% of this code is their own property if you exclude the DRM inserted to paywall users from a simple audio driver.
The SOF driver is dual licensed GPL or BSD3c and hence reuse in this example is permitted under the BSD3c license.
See below the header for the sound/soc/sof/intel/hda-dsp.c file mentioned above:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause) // // This file is provided under a dual BSD/GPLv2 license. When using or // redistributing this file, you may do so under either license. // // Copyright(c) 2018 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Regards, -Pierre
Hi there. The issue is, the developer in question does not use GPL nor BSD, and does not credit the original SOF project or show differences at all
------- Original Message ------- On Friday, May 19th, 2023 at 8:25 AM, Pierre-Louis Bossart pierre-louis.bossart@linux.intel.com wrote:
On 5/15/23 10:00, ryan wrote:
Hey there, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to report a potential SOF license violation.
A person by the name CoolStar (aka starplayer132 and coolstarorg) is a developer in the custom Chromebook modding scene who creates drivers for Chromebooks running Windows 10/11. They sell SOF drivers for $10. However, when the driver is decompiled/deobfuscated using a reverse engineering program called Ghidra, the strings in the binary are identical to the ones in the Linux driver.
Here is a function from the Linux driver found in the Windows one:
The issue is that this SOF-based driver is closed source and, most importantly, paid, which completely violates the GPL license the original driver is using. Only about 15% of this code is their own property if you exclude the DRM inserted to paywall users from a simple audio driver.
The SOF driver is dual licensed GPL or BSD3c and hence reuse in this example is permitted under the BSD3c license.
See below the header for the sound/soc/sof/intel/hda-dsp.c file mentioned above:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause) // // This file is provided under a dual BSD/GPLv2 license. When using or // redistributing this file, you may do so under either license. // // Copyright(c) 2018 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Regards, -Pierre
[please don't top-post on mailing lists]
The issue is, the developer in question does not use GPL nor BSD, and does not credit the original SOF project or show differences at all
please see https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html for more details.
------- Original Message ------- On Friday, May 19th, 2023 at 8:25 AM, Pierre-Louis Bossart pierre-louis.bossart@linux.intel.com wrote:
On 5/15/23 10:00, ryan wrote:
Hey there, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to report a potential SOF license violation.
A person by the name CoolStar (aka starplayer132 and coolstarorg) is a developer in the custom Chromebook modding scene who creates drivers for Chromebooks running Windows 10/11. They sell SOF drivers for $10. However, when the driver is decompiled/deobfuscated using a reverse engineering program called Ghidra, the strings in the binary are identical to the ones in the Linux driver.
Here is a function from the Linux driver found in the Windows one:
The issue is that this SOF-based driver is closed source and, most importantly, paid, which completely violates the GPL license the original driver is using. Only about 15% of this code is their own property if you exclude the DRM inserted to paywall users from a simple audio driver.
The SOF driver is dual licensed GPL or BSD3c and hence reuse in this example is permitted under the BSD3c license.
See below the header for the sound/soc/sof/intel/hda-dsp.c file mentioned above:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause) // // This file is provided under a dual BSD/GPLv2 license. When using or // redistributing this file, you may do so under either license. // // Copyright(c) 2018 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
Regards, -Pierre
participants (2)
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Pierre-Louis Bossart -
ryan