This could be a bit more subtle than it might first appear. Most countries have in their copyright something that allows an entity that has a lawfully made and lawfully obtained physical object that they obtained from someone else to resell that particular object without violating copyright.

This is why used bookstores can exist legally.

This is also why when you buy a Samsung TV from Best Buy, and want the GPL code, you have to ask Samsung rather than Best Buy. Best Buy did distribute the TV (and thus the binary software contained therein) to you, but since that distribution did not require permission of the copyright owner Best Buy has no GPL obligation.

Note that this works for Best Buy because they are essentially receiving copies of the software and then just passing those copies through to their customers, in a one to one manner. If Best Buy were modifying the code in the TV, of if they were copying the code into other TVs (say copying the code from a high end TV model to a lower end model to enable premium features), then they would no longer be operating in a one to one pass through fashion, and would need permission of the copyright owner--and then WOULD have GPL obligations and you would turn to Best Buy for the code to your television.

Now suppose some OEM makes a generic TV platform. It consists of the guts of the TV (display, power supply, electronics, and firmware), ready to be put in to a case. A company like Kogan or Best Buy that wants a house brand TV can buy the guts from the OEM, put it into a case they have someone else make for them that has their name on it, and sell it as their own.

Suppose also that the firmware consists of a minimal Linux system, configured to automatically start a shell running as user 'tv' after boot, and the startup scripts for the 'tv' user start a minimal X server, and then run ~/tvapp, which just puts up a minimal TV GUI that lets you change channels and adjust the volume.

The company buying these and rebranding them (who I shall call "the store") as their own writes their own version of tvapp that puts up a full featured GUI that allows for control of all the TV features (or they license a full featured tvapp from someone else and just replace the graphics and modify the text so it looks like it is theirs).

If the OEM that made the generic TV guts was careful, all modifications the store makes consist of just replacing ~/tvapp. They do not do anything that would create a derivative work of any of the open source code that the OEM used, and that code is just passed through from the OEM to the consumer one to one with no copying, and the net result is that the store does not end up with any obligation to provide anyone with copies of the source to the open source code in their TV.

Applying this to the present case, the big question then is just what is Kogan doing to produce their branded phones and tablets and TVs? Are they dealing with an OEM like the hypothetical one I described above, and just adding user mode applications to a generic system that is being treated as a black box? If so, then they in fact not be violating any licenses, and it would be the OEM that people need to turn to for their copies of the source.

On the other hand, if they were doing something like getting generic devices from one OEM, and taking firmware that got from a contractor, and installing copies of that firmware into the OEM devices, and the contractor used open source in that firmware, then Kogan would be responsible for providing the source code. In this case, they are making copies, not just passing on copies they received one for one to their customers.

Based on a quick (and perhaps imperfect) read of the article, I was not able to tell which of the above best describes what Kogan is doing. Do we know?