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

Buy a plane ticket

[lrdviperscorpian]

Buy a plane ticket and pack a baseball bat. wuss

What is the correct way to pursue this?

[Anonymous Coward]

vigilante justice.

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. :)

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.

Re:Don't bother

[alienw]

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).

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).

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.

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 ;))