Michal Čihař - GPL violation - Getting the sources

GPL violation - Getting the sources

Having found Gammu usage in proprietary software and finding somebody who is actually having the source code, the only remaining (and the hardest) step was to make them publish it.

I started with explaining what actually GPL means, giving them links to useful documentation what they should do, but I'm probably not good enough in explaining the things.

All I was given is source of some parts of Gammu code they have used (it is available in our git repository since then). Any attempts on explaining them that they should publish full source code of the thing to comply with GPL have simply failed.

The problem with the sources they have given is that it is hardly to reuse in Gammu - it is hard to find on which version they based and more importantly, it really does not include much code which would be useful in Gammu these days.

Comments

wrote on Jan. 11, 2011, 1:37 p.m.

It doesn't matter. It's still somebody else's intellectual property and they have stolen it.
There's nothing more pathetic than a thief who gets something given to him for nothing, but still needs to steal it.
The GPL is just another form of copyright protection and the only price the owner is asking is attribution. That's not much.
Passing on the code to enrich the rest of the social context is an exercise that wouldn't exactly hurt, either.

wrote on Jan. 11, 2011, 3:40 p.m.

Please pass the info to SFLC [1] - they know how to deal with people like that.

Cheerio,
Ivan

[1] Software Freedom Law Center http://www.softwarefreedom.org/

foo wrote on Jan. 11, 2011, 4:02 p.m.

Tell them they are f-cking dirty pirates and will be going to jail.

Philipp Kern wrote on Jan. 12, 2011, 10:21 a.m.

"The GPL is just another form of copyright protection and the only price the owner is asking is attribution. That's not much." That's CC-BY, if I'm not mistaken.

wrote on Jan. 12, 2011, 11:16 a.m.

@Ivan: I was in touch with SFLC at beginning and they suggested me to try getting code myself first. Now I did not receive reply from them yet...

@Phillip: Right, that would be CC-BY, GPL does not require attribution, just the "complete corresponding machine-readable source code".