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Mambo Users Threatened
An anonymous reader writes "Newsforge has an article about a recent dispute over code in Mambo (a Free CMS). A Mr. Connolly has sent threatening emails to Mambo users over this, a move John Weathersby of OSSI was quoted as saying 'That's ... not prudent.' The dispute is over some trivial code that checks whether a story is a lead story and if so displays it across multiple columns, as it's a modification of GPL code the Mambo team maintain it must remain GPL but Mr. Connolly claims otherwise."
If you are presently using the software application "Mambo OS" in any release post October 3, 2003, you and your organization are potentially exposed to CIVIL LITIGATION and possibly CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.
FUD. More FUD. Even more FUD.
What kind of idiot thinks FUD == Money? Hasn't SCO proven that FUD != Money? *sigh*
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
When are we going to start putting the Coral link IN THE STORY around here?
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Open source developers need to err on the side of rejecting submissions rather than risk accepting corrupted ones. From the sounds of it, Sakic took some of the work he was paid to do exclusively for Connelley and gave it away to the Mambo guys. If that be the case, and we wouldn't know until the shit really hits the fan, then it would be very cut and dry: Sakic was wrong and the Mambo guys should have known better.
Granted the laws should be changed, because as they stand right now they only benefit lawyers. If company A believes company B has a legal right to sell a product to company A then it should be immune to litigation, and company B should be the one that gets hit. Company A should have the legal right to rewrite the code until it is no longer the infringing code. The time frame, and whether the old code would have to be stripped immediately would of course be set by law.
Maybe the safest bet until that happens, if it ever happens, is for OSS projects to bite the bullet and do even more work "in house" than accept submissions rather than risk getting SCO'd.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
He is redistributing Mombo from his website, but theoretically it would only be original Mombo code (without his contracted mods) if the mods hadn't made it back into the main branch.
If I were paid to, say, take The Horde, and make modifications to it for a company in order to make it interact with product X, thereby giving this company a (percieved) advantage over their competitors, I have no right to take the modifications and give them back to the The Horde development team without permission from the company I was contracted by.
Now, If the company I wrote the code for were to go on and sell "their version" of The Horde, it would have to be GPL'd, but they are only using it internally - so it doesn't.
This is one of the advantages of OSS to comercial entities - they can take the code, modify it to their needs and use it without hassle. They can make money with an OSS program, they just can't make money off selling a derivative of a program without sharing the love (GPL'ing it).
Although, I'd like to see this guy do the noble thing and release the changes back to the Mombo team as a show of good will and gratitiude for being able to use the code as a base for his success, he is in no way compelled to do so.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
... if I had mod points right now.
The NewsForge article is so bipartite structured such that it gives Connolly's view, then Emir Sakic's view. There is no formal introduction nor conclusion. If you start reading and bail out, you'll think the article is entirely pro-Connolly. If you read towards all the way to end, you'll get a much better perspective.
To pull our heads away from the heat, if this story was never /.'ed, Connolly and his Furthermore would probably never be heard (NewsForge said he was "far from being the pioneer in this industry"). Now he's given much more publicity than he could never earn if he had not hyped up the issue.
I once had a signature.
Duh, I said that: "That doesn't mean he has to distribute it, though."
Not quite.
You can get the source code to Darwin, which is the BSD OS that underlies Mac OSX. The Aqua GUI itself is not derived from BSD - but you can still get all the BSD derived stuff for OSX in source form. Apple did not close up the BSD code they used.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Gates has set back the cause of quality proprietary software by 20 years with his viral-like Microsoft EULA, which infects everything it comes into contact with.
Notice that Apple based their OS around the Darwin kernel, precisely because of the major problems inherant in the Microsoft EULA.
How can we (the closed source community) ever hope to be taken seriously by the people with the big bucks (Fortune 500 corportations and governments) when our main software license imposes so many unreasonable restrictions? It's time to kill the Microsoft EULA.
IANAL, but this seems like a very simple dispute to settle.
Mr. Connolly's dispute is with Mr. Sakic. When you pay someone to do creative work for you, you do not necessarily transfer ownership of the copyright with it. First things first, Mr. Connolly must produce a contract that transfers the copyright to him. If he has no such contract, he has no case what-so-ever because he doesn't own the code.
Secondly, with such a contract, he must show that the code in Mambo actually infringes on his copyright. Without such proof, he has no case what-so-ever because there is no infringement.
Now, again IANAL, but if Mr. Connolly were to be able to prove both of these things, restitution must come from Mr. Sakic, not from some innocent bystander. The *users* of Mambo are *not* in violation of any copyright law. As an example, it is not infringement of copyright for me to listen to a copy of a song -- only to *copy* it.
The Mambo team *might* also be infringing since they distribute Mambo. However, I am willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that no court in the world would hear a case against Mambo without resolution of a case against Mr. Sakic. If Mr. Connolly makes no move to sue Mr. Sakic, I believe they are pretty much safe to ignore him (Note: this is not legal advice as I am in no way qualified to give advice).
Now, if Mr. Connolly instead argues that the code modification is a trade secret, then he also only has a case against Mr. Sakic. Once a trade secret has been released, it is no longer a trade secret. He may indeed have a case against Mr. Sakic in this area (though I highly doubt it), but no one else is at risk.
So in summary, Mr. Connolly should sue Mr. Sakic if he has a legitimate grievance. Until that issue is settled, he would be wise to keep his mouth shut.
In my personal opinion, if you hire a free software programmer to modify a GPL piece of software, it is *your* responsibility to explain *very clearly* that you do not want the changes distributed. Distribution of modified GPL code is the norm. If you do not explain this I think you will have a hard time convincing anyone that the programmer should have known better.
Hmm.. mabe I should start using a spell checker... and of course it is Mambo, not Mamba.. ah well..
It's obvious to anyone that this scenario could easily have been avoided. The issue here is the restrictive nature of the GPL. Had this code been released under the more flexible and free BSD license, none of these issues would arise.
WRONG.
The issue here is that Connolly claims Sakic inserted code under a restrictive licence into a GPL program without the copyright holder's permission. Replace "GPL" with "BSD", and the argument made by Connolly is the same, regardless of its legal backing.
At most, the only additional right Sakic would have if Mambo were BSD would be the ability to relicence Mambo code into a proprietary program whether or not he is the original author; credit need only be given. Under the GPL, Sakic would have to be the original author in order to relicence the code.
However, Connolly's argument arises from the appearance of similar functionality in Mambo after it was added to his own proprietary program. He claims the code was lifted from the modifications made by Sakic; the programmer says he reimplemented the functionality in a clean situation. BSD or GPL, Connolly would still argue that Sakic had no right to contribute the code to Mambo that was written for Furthermore and licenced under tight restrictions. BSD or GPL, Sakic would still argue that he rewrote entirely new code for Mambo.
Connolly still got his damn code in the first place, and since he isn't distributing it, the GPL as it applies to Furthermore is dormant (recall that the code Sakic modified for Furthermore was under the GPL). The GPL would only kick in if Connolly distributes Furthermore and if Sakic was not the original author, and thus would have had had no right to relicence the Mambo code.
Now, get off your soapbox.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Although the contractor's legal standing in this matter likely tilts in his favor, his behaviour in the matter does not pass the smell test.
If the guy was paid to design and write code for Mr. Connelly, he should give it to Mr. Connelly. Any subsequent use of it, or the ideas, should be done with Mr. Connelly's permission. If Mr. Connelly has responsibilities with respect to the GPL, give him the opportunity to fulfill them.
Come on. Let's lose this "gimme" hacker's mentality, and take the moral high ground. Let's do things because they are the right thing to do. I would like to think that the Open Source world is populated by gentlemen.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's when a poster makes an assertion about another poster that he has never met, never seen, and doesn't know. Go ahead, assert that I skip-read it. I am not aware of any eye-tracking device that you have attached to my head, or any mind-reading ability on your part. I might as well respond to you by saying that I hate it when posters write one-handed while having a thumb up their ass. It's a great disparaging remark lobbed in your direction, but it is wholly removed from reality. Or at least I hope it is.
Ah, but that's not quite what he says. If it is, could you quote where you found that? I just copied some of your verbiage and ran a search on the article, and it's not coming up with that wording. Instead, the wording is: "The code delivered to Brian Connolly is not the same as the code implemented in Mambo." Well, duh. Because he changed it, like any intelligent person would. He does the same thing regarding the contract. He doesn't say there was never any contractual obligation, he simply says he didn't sign it. Which gets back to my original point: he's right, he'll win in a court of law, but it sounds disingenuous, like he's relying on semantics for protection. This works in a court of law. In the court of public opinion, people like me can be skeptical.
No. He has a fourth, which is the one I've been trying to put forward:
4. He employed Emir to write some software, and even had a contract keeping those changes private in accordance with the GPL. But he never got more than (I suspect) an email or verbal agreement to the contract, and even if he did, Emir is smart enough to modify the code beyond recognition. So his grievance is that he got suckered. His problem is that there is no law against getting suckered (probably).
So I concede that Connolly is thick-skulled twice-over if he's going to sue people over this. I said from the start that Emir would win. My point was only that this doesn't absolve Emir, because (if the Literati documents are truthful), he knew the technicalities of this far better than Connolly and used it in a misleading way, at Connolly's expense (again, legal, but ethically, I don't want to work with someone like that). And again with the disclaimer: if it turns out the published documents are not truthful, then everything I say could be wrong. This is just Slashdot-level armchair-warrior/backseat driving. And shame on you, townmouse, for trying to raise the discourse to Groklaw's level. :)
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