Sigma Designs/XVid Update

Reagen Ward and many other people have written in with updates to the Sigma Designs/XVid situation, reported a few days ago. Sigma has replied in email and a press release that they intend to make the source code available, however, they seem to be paying lip service at best to the terms of the GNU Public License. Grant Gross from Newsforge has been pursuing the story and in a story yesterday and another today lays out the current situation.

Comments

What a crock

[sydlexic]

I'm so tired of hearing the 'evil loner' excuse from companies. Make someone responsible. Fire their asses or have someone resign. Show the world this crap won't be tolerated. Instead what we get is this lame excuse that we're not to blame because of some rogue employee. When employees fail, it's management's responsibility.

Re:Source code

[jonathan_ingram]

Yes, they have made the source code available. However, they nowhere state that it is a derivative work of XviD (although they state that it was 'inspired' by XviD) - they are claiming complete copyright over it.

Why should you care?

It's not a licencing issue - it's a copyright issue. If a have some GPL code, and I own the copyright, then I have the right to relicence the code any way I wish (including giving a company the right to use it in a closed source application - probably for a fee). If I have GPL code which I do *not* own the copyright for, then I have *no* rights to relicence.

This is a similar situation to that facing Mozilla a few months ago - they wanted to relicence the code, but couldn't unless they could contact *every single copyright owner* to get consent (and in Mozilla's case this meant every contributor of a significant patch).

Sigma Designs have taken someone elses code, and claimed copyright over it. This copyright claim (if it were correct) gives them the right to use the stolen code in closed source applications -- and it *is* being used in closed source and hardware applications.

So it doesn't matter that Sigma have opened the source to the stolen code. That's the smaller evil.