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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.
Update: 01/11 14:01 GMT by KD : That was fast. WinMTR announced that the code is now available under the GPLv2.
It's been extended to the ridiculous, remember?
So even if they've somehow removed all the GPL code contributed by others, then there's the whole 'derivative works' thing.
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.
They might actually have that right IF:
- It contains only code they have copyright over
- They have permission from (if any) all other copyright holders.
However they can't revoke the license they gave everyone who downloaded their gpl versions, these old versions and their license is still valid.
However if the code indeed contains mtr code and they have no permission from the copyright holders to distribute is under something else than the GPL.... Then they have a problem
But you have to prove that first.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Doesn't make it legal. There's still copyright on Abandonware, the idea though is that the original authors will make no/cannot make an attempt to litigate, hence it being "abandoned". The classification doesn't usually come from the author, but people who find great software that's (typically) no longer available, then make an effort to keep distribution of that software alive.
Don't just take my word for it: Wikipedia on Abandonware.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Unless everyone who originally submitted code to the GPL project has explicitly agreed to the relicensing, they're breaking the law. You don't "implicitly" agree to relicensing of code you've submitted just by not contributing any more for a while. The only time that a time frame comes into it is when the copyright actually expires and the project falls into the public domain, which in our era of life-plus and Mickey Mouse Copyright Perpetuation Acts, is basically never. This is the exact type of scenario the GPL was designed to prevent.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
There's no such thing as "abandonware".
You've invented a term that is popular but doesn't actually exist in legal parlance. There's copyrighted work like 1928's Steamboat Willie, and then there's uncopyrighted work like 1946's It's A Wonderful Life (the license was not renewed) AKA public domain. Since this MTR program is only 10 years, the copyright has Not run out yet.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The post just mentions it is 'presumed' that it was based on mtr...
I find that a bit week. First you have to prove that there ever was mtr code in winMTR, then you accuse them with a GPL violation.... Either the summary is incomplete/incorrect, or the submitter is jumping to the second part without doing enough fact checking.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
It may be a GPL violation, but who cares? Those tools already ship free in every OS on the planet. Nobody's going to make any money off this. And the fact that nobody from the community contributed code in 10 years kind of tells us what level of interest there is.
Comment of the year
Perhaps before going in with guns ablazing, some tact would be helpful. Their webpage doesnt exactly scream "hostile", as they are still offering the utility free (provided you sign up for a newsletter). They may be violating the GPL, but it may be entirely unintentional or out of ignorance-- could the author of MTR simply email them, informing them of the situation? He will eventually have to contact them anyways, I believe-- wouldnt any eventual lawsuit have to come from an author of MTR anyways?
I mean, its GOOD that someone is updating this utility; going after them with a lawsuit right off the bat doesnt exactly make "lets update abandoned GPL software" look like a good idea.
If there's no expiry date in the contract you agree to, then as long as you continue to use the service (the gpl'd code), then you are continuously agreeing to abide by the terms of the contract. There's no abandonment clause.
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
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?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Everyone else can do exactly nothing (well not use it and rant on the interwebs about it I guess).
I finally managed to pull a copy of the v0.8 source from archive.org, and it seems that you can still access the CVS repository even though it seems to be missing from the SourceForge page. I can find references to contributions by Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir (the main developer) and Silviu Simen in the source code and Teodorescu Cristian in the commit logs. The latter is interesting as he seems to have started work on WinMTR 0.9 in 2004, contradicting Appnor's statement of inactivity.
Or I can just go on wikipedia and get the same info without having to navigate 100 other sites. And if I wanna check the sources, I can just scroll down. Fuck you.
If, by accident, I have published copyrighted material on sourceforge in a gpl project, I need to be able to rectify my mistake and remove it.
I think, it is a mandatory use case.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I think there is a need for some clarifications:
1) The company has rights over the entire source code, bought from the original maintainer. There is NO other code from contributors.
2) The whole thing is written from scratch for Windows. No MTR code is used.
3) The binary is available for free. We just thought nobody cared too much having it Open, since there were no contributions in almost 10 years.
Again, we are not trying to violate GPL and we will make sure there are no licensing issues. We are checking this with our lawyers.
Dragos MANAC
CEO Appnor MSP S.A.
If copyright weren't so unbalanced by corporate lobbying, this work would eventually become public domain.
At that point, you can just ignore the GPL or any other license because it isn't required anymore.
The GPL only has any force because the default state of everything is "all rights reserved" and copyrights are effectively perpetual at this point.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
No, it's like Hitler adopting GPLed code and then arbitrarily deciding 10 years later to relicence it.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
If not, then they can make future versions proprietary if they wish, since they presumably hold all of the copyrights. OTOH if there have been outside (community) contributions, then they can only take it proprietary if everyone who has touched the code consents. So we still don't know enough to say whether this is a violation or not.
Note that the above has absolutely no bearing on past versions; you can't "take back" existing code after it has been distributed under the GPL. If they are trying to go after people for distributing old versions (or derivatives thereof), then this is indeed a blatant GPL violation.
sequence[seq].index = index;
sequence[seq].transit = 1;
sequence[seq].saved_seq = ++host[index].xmit;
appear in both sources.
They aren't saying that MTR hasn't been updated. They have sometime in the past created WinMTR, hosted it on SourceForge as GPL and OpenSource, but in the past ten years never had anyone but themselves making changes. So... they decided to convert to a commercial license! Now I'm not arguing that this is right since original MTR source likely still exists within it but the ideas that they are denying MTR as having been updated is incorrect.. This is sort of like how other products have gone from OpenSource to closed in the past when no one was helping out except the original developers... except that in this case they aren't the very original developers having converted someone else's code some ten years in the past. It's not clear if they have continued to use updates to the original MTR code or not.
Here's the post from their page in case it's still Slashdotted...
========
Present (2010-2011)
WinMTR is managed and developed by Appnor MSP.
The current version is 0.9. We plan to roll out a new version each quarter. More in the Development section.
License: Commercial. We changed it from GPL since in the last 10 years there was no external development. Still, we plan to offer it for free.
WinMTR has got a new home, moved out of Sourceforge on to WinMTR.net!
Past (2000-2010)
The WinMTR project was started in 2000 by our good friend Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir.
Timeline:
* 20.01.2002 – Last entered hosts an options are now hold in the registries. Home page and development moved to Sourceforge.
* 05.09.2001 – Replace edit box with combo box which hold last entered hostnames. Fixed a memory leak which caused program to crash after a long time running. (v0.7)
* 11.27.2000 – Added resizing support and flat buttons. (v0.6)
* 11.26.2000 – Added copy data to clipboard and possibility to save data to file as text or HTML. (v0.5)
* 08.03.2000 – Added double-click on host name in list for detailed information. (v0.4)
* 08.02.2000 – fix ICMP error codes handling. Print an error message corresponding to ICP_HOST_UNREACHABLE error code instead of a empty line. (v0.3)
* 08.01.2000 – support for full command-line operations (v0.2)
* 07.28.2000 – first release (v0.1)
Future (2011-2038)
We plan to further develop WinMTR, keep it running on newer platforms and add the requested functionality. Find out how you can help by reading the Development page.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
The concept of Abandonware does seem to be in-line with the original purpose of copyright; to grant creators the ability to make money from their creations. If creators are no longer interested in making money from a specific creation, then there is no need for the copyright. All this talk about piracy and copyright infringement is really a red herring from people who want to turn copyright into perpetual property rights rather than time-limited monopolies.
The problem with wikipedia is that fucking idiots with admin hats go around making the place worse every day.
So basically, what you're saying is, wikipedia is a subset of earth.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Worse, there actually appears to be code directly copied from mtr in the WinMTR codebase, which contradicts Appnor's current claim that it was independently developed.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Actually based on their reply at http://winmtr.net/slashdot.html it makes more sense....
Quoted directly from the link,
"Dear visitor,
You have reached us through a Slashdot story that is a bit malvolent.
The story goes like this:
"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"
Our response:
1. Our company has rights over the entire source code, bought from the original maintainer. We are the current maintainers. There is NO other code from contributors.
2. The whole thing is written from scratch for Windows. No MTR code is used.
3. The binary is available for free. We just thought nobody cared too much having it Open, since there were no contributions in almost 10 years. The license changes we made are justified by the fact that we own the copyright for the code.
Again, we are not trying to violate GPL and we will make sure there are no licensing issues. In the unlikely situation in which there are some licensing issues, we will make all the required changes/updates to the product, in good faith.
The license changes we made are justified by the fact that we own the copyright for the code, nothing else. A good reason was the lack of interest for the project in the OSS community.
We think the license change is within the boundaries of GPL. We are double checking this with our lawyers.
Thank you for reading the full story.
Dragos MANAC
CEO Appnor MSP S.A."
With this information it is quite well within their rights assuming they are the owners the source code and have no outside contributions.
Thus you could still obtain a copy of the code which was released under the GPL and fork it. However, since no one touched it in a while I really doubt there is much interest.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.
Advice: on VPS providers
The CEO has promised to revert the product back to GPLv2:
http://winmtr.net/slashdot.html
"Instead of dealing with this, I decided to take the blame and do the mature thing: revert to GPL v2. By the end of the week (January 16 2011) the updated sources (stating the new license) will be on Sourceforge for all to download and further enhance."
Please update the story. It seems like Dragos is at least trying to operate with good faith and fix a potential mistake.
Your response is just as typical. Ignoring the fact that it is really common for people to differentiate between 'abandonware' and other forms of copyright infringement. 'abandonware' specifically refers to software that cannot be obtained new at any price. There simply is no way to pay for it. Thus, while 'abandonware' is certainly a euphemism for a particular class of copyright violation, claiming that it has anything to do with "everything-should-be-FREEEEEE" is a gross mischaracterization of what is being discussed. By the way, your first sentence was also an ad-hominem attack, so you are guilty of exactly what you accuse the parent poster of.
Well, that makes a lot more sense.
The owners of the code in question can really do whatever they want with it. They will not be able to retroactively remove the GPL from previous versions but they can change future versions.
I guess some people get so wrapped up in the ideology, they can't see the forest for the trees.