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How To Fight International OSS License Violations?

sirshannon asks: "Frans Bouma's LLBLGen is a free, open source code generator that he licensed under the BSD license so that anyone could use it in any way, as long as they gave him some credit. Now Codease has released a product that apparently uses his code for 90% of the functionality but doesn't bother to attribute it to him. Frans lives in The Netherlands, Codease is in Singapore. What is the correct way to pursue this?"

1 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't bother by alienw · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, I think you are trolling. Most licenses have not been "tested" in a court of law, and they don't need to be "tested" to be perfectly good. In fact, a license that has never been disputed is probably stronger than one that has been challenged in court. I don't see too many people saying that Microsoft's EULA is unenforceable, because it clearly is. That license imposes many more restrictions on end-users than the GPL or any free software license does, so it would be much more vulnerable. Yet nobody challenged it so far.

    Besides, the AT&T case had nothing to do with the BSD license and everything to do with the fact that AT&T failed to properly register its copyrights (a procedure that's no longer necessary).