Hello fordem,
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Since I am not a lawyer, I will also avoid the licensing issues, I have no problem, conceptually, in paying the more than reasonable license fee - but I will say that there appear to be grey areas on how things are being done given my limited understanding of the open source license that is a given for any product based on linux.
Linux is just a kernel. Define a product based on Linux? There are a lot of proprietary user-space applications that run on top of the Linux kernel. That is why many libraries use LGPL licensing terms. There is plenty of documentation online to clarify your confusion regardless of whether you are a lawyer or not.
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To make it clear - if the statement that the product does not provide any facilities for a gateway, simply means that there is no place to enter one - then this does not mean that the box has no way to reach the internet.
I made the statement that NASLite has no “concept of a gateway” meaning that there is no default gateway set in the kernel routing table. If that is not sufficient for one’s comfort, then placing a traffic sniffer on the LAN and examining the traffic should resolve the issue and establish satisfactory and conclusive results. Surely someone has done this already. After all, if the much more complex task of decrypting the management code was done; analyzing the NASLite network activities should not be a problem.
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Java code on the NAS box sends the client PC to the webserver which in turn pushes more java code to the PC, instructing it to get the default gateway and run a CLI instruction on the NAS box, setting a default route and you're done. You can take it one step further and put a script on the configuration diskette that runs at every power up of the NAS box.
The whole point of NASLite is to reduce the number of binaries to the absolute bare essentials. Preventing the possibility of scenarios such as what you are describing is one of the reasons why NASLite does not include everything and the kitchen sink. It contains only an optimized set of binaries necessary for core functionality. The result of that approach is reliable, consistent, predictable and stable operation without unnecessary overhead.