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?"

Comments

Re:Don't bother

[cbiffle]

You're probably trolling, but my radar is off today.

Considering that, to date, the BSD license is the only one of the two that has been tested in a court of law, I don't really understand your point.

(I'm referring to the AT&T/USL code settlement of the 90s.)

I suspect this guy's entire problem is that he's using the old advertising-clause BSD license, and Codease probably assumed when he said 'BSD' he meant 'modern BSD.' Were it a modern BSD license, they could use his code without attribution.

Since they've since started to acquiesce to his demands, I suspect they may have finally read his license and realized their mistake.

Misplaced blame

[drsmithy]

This apparently is the downside of releasing software under the BSD license: there are always lazy people around which just grab your hard work and act as if they spend 3 months of programming the stuff, because they didn't.

No, it isn't a downside at all, because they're not following the BSD licence terms. If they were, they *wouldn't* be able to "grab your work and act as if they spent 3 months programming". The only reason you're "losing out" is because the other party hasn't followed the rules - it's got nothing to do with the licence itself (assuming you knew the implications of released something under it in the first place).

*Exactly* the same thing could happen with GPLed code (and has - Linksys).

It's not about money,

[Otis_INF]

It's about not obeying the license. I want my code being acknowledged as the code the application of CodeAse is build on, a very large portion of the code is mine, it is licensed under a simple license so all they have to do is follow indeed the line you quoted :)

I chose this BSD variant because it was restrictive enough so people who would build a new tool based on it would have to produce the copyright but still would be able to sell it eventually.

If it was about money, I shouldn't have had it released as sourcecode in the first place, I think. :) I released the source so others could modify it to meet their requirements, and if they distributed it in binary form, the BSD license would ensure the binary form would show the copyright notice... (in an ideal world that is ;))