Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for GPL

It has been some time since I updated information about Gammu usage in proprietary software, so here it comes (see other posts tagged with gpl for more information).

I still have troubles to explain Anwsoft what they are supposed to release. The good news is that they are still communicating and even providing some updated sources (see git repository), unfortunately they still construct fake projects rather than providing real sources of the application.

Anyway if anybody is interested in digging in the sources and finding bits which might be interesting for porting to current Gammu code base, please go ahead, I probably won't have time for that in near future.

After previous series of posts about Gammu usage in proprietary software, finding culprit and getting the sources I got number of questions and suggestions. So what are the suggestions?

Lesson I've learned is that even though the website seems to be dead, the project itself does not have to be. This is what I thought about http://gpl-violations.org/ and I was proven wrong and these guys are now looking at my case.

Another option is Software Freedom Law Center - http://www.softwarefreedom.org/. I've contacted them from the very beginning (about year ago) and got some useful hints, though now my contact seems to be gone (or simply too busy).

FSF also provides information how to proceed in case of license violation.

Maybe these hints will be also useful for somebody else and I hope they will help me as well.

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.

After finding that Sonim's software uses GPL licensed Gammu, the obvious step was to ask them for sources of the software. They quickly transferred their responsibility to company which made software for them - A&W (Anwsoft).

It took some iterations to explain them that I'm pretty sure that their software is based on Gammu and finally they gave up pointing to some external contributor for being guilty of this:

Due to the product was developed years ago, and the source code was bought from a SOHO programmer on the first beginning, so we didn’t notice it included some open source code inside.

The good thing in the same thing was that they were willing to cooperate:

We are willing to cooperate with you to follow GPL License and provide corresponding sources.

As it turned out in upcoming communication, they didn't have (and still don't have) idea what GPL license contains and what they should publish. But that's story for the next post.

As the communication in this case seems to be stuck and the issue is almost one year old, it's time to make bits of it public. The first post will just describe how I've discovered it, later will bring more details.

All started innocently with bug report on Gammu that it fails to work with some Sonim phones. We started to dig some information about what extensions does Sonim use and one of obvious ways was to try their software. I picked up software for Sonim XP3.20 Quest and started to look at it (if you are not going to install them, but want to look, you need unrar and unshield to unpack it). Actually all their software with exception of the one for XP2.10 Spirit is based on same code, so it does not matter that much which one you choose.

At first look the names of DLLs looked familiar to me and running strings on the DLLs just confirmed my suspicion - the phone which is not supported by Gammu bases it's official software on it. I was able to recognize at least seven DLLs derived from (GPL licensed) Gammu (they even use same names as Gammu modules had in that time):

• At.dll
• ATgen.dll
• Common.dll
• FBus.dll
• IRDA.dll
• ObexGen.dll
• Serial.dll

To make the thing more interesting they use several other components released under free software licenses, where they also should provide sources for them:

• ID3LIB.DLL - id3lib (LGPL)
• WbXmlParser.dll- libwbxml (LGPL)
• lame_enc.dll - lame (LGPL)

There might be more, but I did not want to spend more time on deep analysis, because I already had enough information.