We all know Micromax has managed to get a fair share in the Indian mobile market. As mentioned earlier in the previous post about how companies like Micromax & Karbonn rip off and rebrand Chinese mobile phones & release them in India.It comes as no surprise that they both are in complete violation of the GPL terms.

One of the forum members of the XDA developers community contacted Micromax to release GPL source code for their kernel and was met with the following response:

“Thank you for your Email, we would like to inform you that we can not provide any kernel source code from our end.”

We gave it a shot and when our team contacted Karbonn Mobiles we received the following response  which was similar:

Both these companies need to realise that by rejecting to release kernel sources for any of their android devices, they are in direct violation of GNU GPL v2.

At this point we would like to inform both these companies to read well and understand the GPL v2 licence.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Finally we want both Micromax & Karbonn mobiles to know that people who contributed to the main Linux kernel would be in a position to enforce their copyright against them. Quite a few Indians have contributed to it and stand all chances to drag both the companies to the court (Yes, we are planning to!)