[mhaehnel]

What interests me is does they respect licenses of the open source stuff they use?

[anubisresources]

The DPRK does not respect the GPL, unsurprisingly.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Though they are a party to the Berne Convention, so they ought to.

[reubensutton]

No, it's all closed source. The binaries aren't publicly distributed either, they seem to be the result of leaks.

[chris_wot]

Makes me wonder what they thought they were going achieve. I'm assuming it's based on a Linux distribution?

I guess when your entire nation is a state controlled echo chamber it's easy to just think that criticism of your code is just jealousy of your achievements.

[anonbanker]

GPL'ed code is probably legal in this case, because they don't distribute publicly. It would be a decently easy case to make in an international IP court that distribution within North Korea is not a public release. However, if a North Korean citizen demanded the source code for Red Star, they may be obligated to provide it, lest they are in violation of the GPL.