Has former copies of the Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation CD-ROM violated the General Public License?
This seems like a straight forward question but one that Corel has beat around the bush in answering. This is going to be a rather lengthy email so I will break it into six major parts: 1) Questioning Corel's distribution practices in January 2000 2) Questioning Corel's distribution practices in April 2000 3) Corel declairs the situation "corrected" in July 2000 4) Corel's excuses for distribution practices 5) What Corel doesn't seem to be willing to dispute 6) Plan of action to bring about a complette correction Part 1: January 2000 Corel Corp. has been trying to re-introduce themselves to industry as a Linux vendor. This process went into full gear earily this year with the Corel LinuxOS Road Tour. I was discouraged to find that this "demostration" of what they where doing seemed to also be a demostration of their disregard for the General Public License (GPL). By providing their "Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation CD-ROM" they where redistributing some 400 packages in Debian package format which where covered by GPL. But they only supplied them in binary only format without anything which appeared to be a written offer of source code. They where able to supply a t-shirt and a "nurf" style blue cube with a warning label "not a toy" on it but no written offer of source code. Well, among the packages appeared to be one that I contributed too so I notified the Corel employees at the event that the redistribution terms for my contribution where not being met and as such redistribution of my contributions should be halted or the terms complied with. A set of excuses (which I will get into later) was provided but in the end I was notified that the situation would be corrected soon. Part 2: April 2000 Approximently three months have passed since the "part 1" event where the promise of a correction coming soon was provided. Yet, at a computer trade show Corel was continuing distributions of the same "Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation CD-ROM." Even more interesting was that Michael Cowpland gave a keynote speech declairing that Corel is "raising the open-source flag" while his staff was actively violating one of the classic open source licenses just up stairs in the same building. Despite the fact that Corel refused to do the simple act of providing a written offer they still claimed to be "embrassing" open source. And my contributions which I cleared stated where to be removed or the situation corrected, they remained as part of the 400 some packages which Corel would continue to violated the redistribution terms of. And again they provided a standard set of excuses which followed up with a request that they be contacted via email.Part 3: July 2000 After emailing them did not seem to change Corel's attitude towards continuing to violated the license (and hence copyright) on my contributions until around July. Finally, a staff member of Corel declaired that *ALL* flavors of Corel LinuxOS including the Open Circulation CD-ROM would either come with source code or a written offer. What the "finalizing" email didn't address and Corel still has not choosen not to address is that they still violated the copyright when their some of their redistribution methods failed to meet licensing requirements for approximently half a year. Part 4: The excuses Some popular excuses from Corel employees as to why it shouldn't matter which aspects of the General Public License they choose to ignore: - Corel is an important contributor to open source. - Corel will continue to be an important contributor to open source. - Why do you need Corel to provide a written offer anyways? - This problem only effects the Open Circulation flavor of Corel LinuxOS which is just a small number of the LinuxOS distributed. - Corel doesn't intend to hide the source code. - Corel provides the source code on their web site. Part 5: My claims that Corel seems to leave undisputed - None of Corel's excuses state something that would consitute having provided a written offer. - None of Corel's excuses state something that gives them the right to wave or disregard sections of the GPL. In fact, their claim of being an important member of the open source community should suggest that they would feel a need to follow GPL compliance in a timely fashion even without outside influce for them to do so. - At no point has Corel attempted to claim that near half a year is an acceptable turn around time for meeting with licensing conditions on open source software. They have never attempted to explain why a sticker or other method of providing a written offer couldn't have been added withen one month's time or less. - Corel has not claimed they have had a legal right to distribute copyrighted works without meeting the licensing conditions for redistribution, they have only claimed that this failure on their part shouldn't matter because of the excuses stated above. Part 6: A plan of action Regardless of if Corel intends to or not, they will act as a model for other companies which decide to join in on getting involved with Linux. As a model, Corel has been pritty awful. Michael Cowpland continue to give speechs as to how Corel "embrasses" open source without ever appologizing for his company's act of violating the General Public License for half a year. Rather, they seem to expect a "forgive and forget" attitude from contributors to Corel LinuxOS since their violation is now a thing of the past. After all, they do have a set of excuses why violating the GPL should be acceptable for near half a year. But with that as a roll model, we should expect other companies to be self-declaired "important" contributors and likewise take on a business practice of temporarily suspending sections of the GPL. This is not acceptable and I feel the past issues should still be addressed in some form. Since talking privately in email with Corel has proven unfruitful (they refuse to even respond AT ALL now). I would like to explore a project among GPL developers to file a lawsuit against Corel. I intend to prove that despite the fact the GPL provides a method of redistribution for free that the package still has a monitary value to it and is still a copyrighted work. Further, I would like to prove that my own copyrighted contributions which where on the Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation CD-ROM have a value not less than $1 per copy. One of the flavors of redistribution Corel choose did not fall withen the licensing method of doing redistribution for free, so for those violations of license should be entitled to damages/royalities. I would be willing to explore a class action lawsuit if other contributors to GPL packages which ship on the Corel Open Circulation CD-ROM wish to also collect royalities for any unlicensed redistribution conducted by Corel. However, it is not my intention to make money off this. Any money rewarded which doesn't go to lawyer fee will hopefully be donated to the Free Software Foundation. Presently, it is my belief that legal action is the only way to get Corel to provide an acceptable responce to the fact that violating the GPL for six months is not acceptable regardless of how "important" or your "intentions" might be. Thanks ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
