Hosting Company Appears To Be Violating the GPL [Resolved]

palegray.net writes "A web hosting provider called Appnor has recently moved the network diagnostics utility WinMTR off of SourceForge, and is now claiming the program to be a closed source, commercial application (it was previously made available under the GPL). I emailed the current maintainer of the original mtr utility about this, and have been informed that this event most likely constitutes an overt GPL violation, as it is presumed that WinMTR contains mtr code. Appnor claims that they have the right to do this, as there have been no external contributions to WinMTR in over ten years. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think copyright law works that way." Update: 01/10 18:24 GMT by KD : The CEO of Appnor, Dragos Manac, has posted a response, claiming that no GPL violation occurred, and promising to revert the code to GPLv2 by the end of the week.
Update: 01/11 14:01 GMT by KD : That was fast. WinMTR announced that the code is now available under the GPLv2.

Comments

Way too early

[MonsterTrimble]

It's 8:30 Monday morning after a night of insomnia. DO we REALLY need to deal with GPL this early? Can't we do something simple like create world peace?

Re:Way too early

[msauve]

# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.

# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
#
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
    for(;;)
            {
                    printf ("World peace!\n");
            }
}

Re:Way too early

[Pharmboy]

perl -e 'print "World Peace\n";'

Some people just make shit too hard.

Re:So let me get this straight:

[Red Flayer]

youre supposed to man up and "read".

Sorry to be such a noob, but I did man up, and the man pages for that command are completely useless in the context of this discussion.

I'm running Debian lenny if that helps.

Re:Abandonware?

[mweather]

And what you don't see in shittypedia is what any ass-hat with admin powers, an axe to grind, and no common sense decided to "blacklist" off of the page. Wikipedia is basically worthless.

If they reverted YOUR edits, it can 't be all that bad.

Re:Who cares

[MysteriousPreacher]

No, it's like Hitler adopting GPLed code and then arbitrarily deciding 10 years later to relicence it.

Re:Abandonware?

[afabbro]

I don't know, it probably wouldn't be because there's no such thing as an Abandonware "classification". It's just a feel-good term made up by people so they feel less bad about blatantly distributing games with still-active copyrights.

BLATANT, I tell you. These people are distributing DOS games whose publisher is out of business and no longer selling them. It's so BLATANT. BTW, the word BLATANT was on my Power Words of the Day Calendar for today.