Net Integration's NITIX OS

Jonathan Hale maclaoch at earthlink.net
Sun Jan 18 07:34:03 CST 2004


To whom it may concern:

I read a recent review in PC Magazine which stated "NITIX is essentially
a very stripped down and hardened version of Linux"... and that it "must
contain an amazingly clean bit of code; it's all of 16MB in size."
Reading this, I thought to myself, "Wow... I'd like to see how that was
done..."  So, I went out to your website and, lo and behold, I couldn't
find it anywhere.  As I would assume you are aware, Linux is published
under the GNU General Public License which, in part, provides that you
must:
(a) "[C]ause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or
in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to
be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms
of this License" and
(b) "Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years,
to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of
physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable
copy of the corresponding source code..."
"For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code
for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition
files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of
the executable."
While I realize that, under the terms of the GPL, you may alternately
"Accompany [the Program] with the complete corresponding
machine-readable source code", obviously, unless you provide it to me,
there is no way--short of me purchasing your software and all the other,
proprietary components which I am not interested in--that I would be
able to verify that you are doing this instead.  Therefore, at the risk
of sounding presumptious, I respectfully request that--if you are
unwilling to provide it to me--you would at least contact the original
author, Linus Torvalds, and demonstrate to him that you are, in fact,
redistributing this code in compliance with the terms of the GPL.

Thank you,
Jonathan K. Hale
(interested third party)




More information about the Kclug mailing list