Slashdot Mirror
"Future Tech" vs KDE Developer
I've been a huge fan of Liquid for some time. I've been compiling releases and using on my laptop. The project isn't nearly as ambitious as Enlightenment, but it has some interesting UI ideas and it looks good. I was really pleased when I found out that Mosfet was going to have a shot at continuing the development of the program for FT under the KDE License. At this point, FT ("The Total Linux Company," according to their website) mentioned a few of the features in Liquid as being part of the benefits of FT's distribution. This was to set them apart from "Other" distributions, although even at the time I found it funny, as The final decision in selecting one RPM based distribution over another would rarely be tipped in favor of the one with translucent menus ;)
Anyway the Changelog contains the following line:
* Future Technologies' name has been removed. They hired me to do KDE development, but failed to pay me after promising to do so three times over the span of several months :( I still haven't seen any of the paychecks they said they would send me, and they even went as far as sending me a fake FedEx number. Now they are saying they can't afford to pay their employees.
And soon after Mosfet's website announced that he was leaving Linux and Liquid was dead. Unable to afford to develop Liquid for free, he was seeking work in the windows world.
According to the site, on 10/28, Dr. Giovanni asked Mandrakesoft, the host of Mosfet.org to take down the site, under threat of legal action. But since I see the site still there, it looks like they are standing their ground which is a good thing.
Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story is, beyond a warning to keep both eyes open. There is a lot of questionable stuff that goes on in this world. Be careful.
(I've emailed Giovanni from FT but have yet to hear back from him.)
I beleive Mosfet has a right to sue FT for making downloads of FTLiquid available even though they haven't paid him for his work. He should still retain the copyrights to his work and be able to control the distribution of it. Or does that not play in the Open source framework?
It's a shame that a decent dude lost his apartment, had a sore ass, and has to deal with a loser CEO.
Good luck Mosfet, maybe we should start a charity fund.
if you ask me, mosfet is totaly right and FT will have to pay. But my question is why any programmer would work for such a company after visiting their web site? After visiting the FT web site, it seems to me that this "company is doomed for failure and is so unoriginal. It sounds like someone just tried to jump on the open source bandwagon and tried to make big bucks without providing anything back to opensource technologies... If FT ever approached me to work for them i would just laught at them.
just my 2 cents worth...
Eh, probably the same thing would happen that happened when there were licensing problems with ipfw in OpenBSD. They just removed all that code and a developer reimplimented it.
A large software company decided to sue these developers, because they believed the developers illegally used their source code. While there was some code which was borrowed (and it was subsequently rewritten to exclude that code), during the discovery phase of that trial, it was discovered that the commercial company had borrowed a great deal of code from the open source developers.
The case was eventually settled and the code is still available.
Guess which codebase? This was 4.4BSD vs the commercial System V Unix. The open source developers won this one, thanks to the fact that the commercial software developers couldn't keep their hands off the open source (obviously being of better quality).
If I understand this correctly, FT made a contract with Mosfet to pay him to code specific software. He performed his part of the bargain, but they breached the contract.
Now THEY claim that they are going to sue!? If anything, HE should be suing THEM. Given their bad faith threats he'd have a good chance at getting more than actual damages.
By the way, it sounds a whole lot like he's an independent contractor instead of an employee, so unless their contract is written and explicitly signs the copyright over, even if they do pay him, he still owns the copyright. See CCNV v Reid.
I dunno. Sounds to me like Mosfet is a real weiner: he left the KDE team all in a huff, and strikes up a new working relationship where he also gets upset.
Common factor in both cases is him.
I suspect we don't have the whole story.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
... that it is so easy to be judged and then placed in the central square for the ritual tomato throwing.
I mean, come on.... if it is true, then by all means, string them up by their balls. But where is the proof?
What if I put up a page where I said that Slashdot hired me, and then refused to pay me - would you run that story? If I said it was Microsoft then? I thought so.
Maybe you know a lot about this guy, things that are not mentioned around here, but so far, all I see is this guy ranting about he didn't get any money from this company. Which may, or may not be true.
Of course, we want it to be true, so we can point our finger at, and hopefully ruin this bad, bad company. What if this guy is lying then? Slashdot is in no way almighty, but it does have some impact on the linux world, or at least we would like to think so. It is not nice to write such about a company that may be struggling without any proof.
So, where is the proof?
Yes, but this does not mean FT must publish the modifications. If they own the code, they can keep it to themselves if they prefer. The GPL only requires that if you publish your work, you must license it under the GPL -- if you don't license your work to anyone, you're not forced to do anything.
Only if FT granted him a license to use the code. Again, if FT decides to not license the code they own at all, it is not legal for anyone to use it.
I don't know what kind of contract was made in this particular case and whether or not Mosfet was allowed to license the code, so I won't comment on this case. But generally, you shouldn't assume you have a license to use code you develop for someone else just because it's GPL-based -- you do have a license for the original code, but for the modifications, you don't have one unless it was granted to you.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.
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