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

Hold up...

[linuxkrn]

Posted @ 3/3/2004 12:11 PM

As a last resort I yesterday asked them why they didn't simply obey the license terms and suddenly they were willing to do so. I've mailed what I wanted them to do (adding a single line to the about box, as stated in the license) however haven't heared since. I'll try mailing them later today again.

Looks like they may have changed their minds. Might want to hold off on the witch hunt... then again why they are so much fun. :)

Yeah I knew the BSD implications :)

[Otis_INF]

I'm Frans Bouma and I wrote LLBLGen and I deliberately chose the BSD license because I don't care if someone could use the code for their own product and sell it or whatever. The core of this issue is indeed that they didn't follow the rules of the license I released the code under. This is what hurts: your work is not acknowledged.

What's annoying is that even when you release the code under a very non-strict license (BSD2 has 2 simple rules, 1 applies to the binary version of the work) people think they can even ignore that single, simple rule. This isn't the first time this happens with the code though, although this time it is so extremely obvious (.NET has nice decompilers so you can peek into the code very easily). It's so obvious because their code is non-hungarian coding style and my code in LLBLGen is written in hungarian coding style (which is uncommon in .NET code, because MS wants you to use a different style, ala Java). So all kinds of weird prefixed names are preserved in the compiled version of CodeAse and which makes the CodeAse code easily comparable with the compiled version of LLBLGen 1.x and the sourcecode.

I admit, with the GPL it wouldn't have been any different: people are still able to rip the code and use it as if it is theirs, however with the GPL you have one difference: if the license violation gets out when it is a GPL violation, there are more people who will know this because the FSF / GPL movement will make sure everybody knows it. But I'm glad someone mailed /. :)

The latest news is that there is no news: I haven't heard back from them, after they (him?) said it was acceptable to follow the BSD license after all and after I then replied that it would be ok if they added a Based on LLBLGen 1.x Copyright Solutions Design line to the about box.