My latest discovery is known as RS-LJ01. It is a small Wifi router made to be used anywhere (got a battery for 4 hours of routing) and an USB port to connect a 3G usb stick. With this you can have your Wifi hotspot in your pocket, and bring it anywhere.

The device is interesting, but the interface is all in japanese and I had some troubles with my basic japanese knowledge and some help from Google Translation to understand what was happening. I first configured my 3G login/password and got internet working, then tried to configure the device to use WPA and not WEP, but then I wasn’t able to login to the WPA network. Took me a while to find the reset button. I made new attempt at WPA using the “secondary SSID” option, without much success either.
I would really love to see what’s wrong with the WPA encryption myself (and maybe fix it), but without more informations about the device, it’s not going to be easy.

Going here and there in the interface, I found a “system log” and was not really surprised to see this kind of stuff:

Jan  1 00:00:02 (none) syslog.info syslogd started: BusyBox v1.11.1
Jan  1 00:00:54 (none) daemon.notice pppd[984]: pppd 2.4.2b1 started by root, uid 0

Yep, this pretty much looks like Linux, with BusyBox and pppd. The webserver looks like Ahead Webserver, and nmap says the Linux kernel is newer than 2.6.9. That makes a lot of opensource software on this little device, but there’s no copy of the GNU GPL anywhere, nothing about the authors of those softwares and nothing anywhere in the provided documentation (in japanese).

Since the log lines obviously shows stuff that comes from good old GPL code, the company behind the product is required, if asked, to provide the sourcecode of used software.

I made a request via a webform on their site as there’s no place on their website which states where to file such requests or download sourcecode.

For information, Japanese companies tend to not respect american licenses such as GPL as those are usually only provided in English. A non-official translation of the GPLv2 in Japanese exists, and can be used as reference.

Anyway hardware vendors tend to often forget some licensing terms when using opensource software. Mentioning names and making sourcecode available somewhere shouldn’t be that hard when you distribute mainstream products. I’ll get a response (if I ever get one) in the next days, I’ll be sure to keep you all tuned, and see if I can provide english interface too