Hello everyone, I will describe my case below, but I'm sending my questions ahead:
1. Is the evidence sufficient to prove code theft? Reason enough for a "cease and desist" request? 2. Does anyone have a recommendation for a lawyer who is familiar with the subject? (I'm in Germany, by the way) Here is the case: I'm the author and maintainer of the Linux tool "usb_modeswitch" which includes several components to bring 3G/4G USB modems and several other devices from "Windows Installer" mode to their actual working mode. It's far from being a piece of art, but I have collected a large bunch of device-specific knowledge; all major Linux distributions have it included by now. It is released under the GPL V2 or later. At the end of May 2013, I bought a cheap tablet "TP7-1000DC (light)" from the German manufacturer i-onik: http://i-onik.de/tp7zoll-dualcore In the file system of the device I discovered these files: usbdongle usbdongled libusbdongle.so These were obviously involved in preparing and using 3G USB modems on the tablet. Now, when I ran the "usbdongle" binary from the command line, it said: Usage: usb_modeswitch [OPTION] ... I dug into the binary "libusbdongle.so" and found these literal strings which are *identical* to the ones in usb_modeswitch: MessageContent %d hex string has uneven length. Skipping ... Trying to send message %d to endpoint 0x%02x ... Looking for active driver ... No driver found. Either detached before or never attached OK, driver found ("%s") Driver "%s" detach failed with error %d. Trying to continue OK, driver "%s" detached Sending Huawei control message ... Error: sending Huawei control message failed (error %d). Aborting. OK, Huawei control message sent Accessing device %03d on bus %03d ... Ambiguous Class/InterfaceClass: 0x%02x/0x08 Error: send endpoint not given or found. Aborting. Error: respond endpoint not given or found. Aborting. Error: could not get description string "manufacturer" Error: could not get description string "product" Error: could not get description string "serial number" USB description data (for identification) ------------------------- Manufacturer: %s Product: %s Serial No.: %s Setting up communication with interface %d ... Could not claim interface (error %d). Skipping message sending Using endpoint 0x%02x for message sending ... Reading the response to the message (CSW) ... Resetting response endpoint 0x%02x Error resetting endpoint: %d Resetting message endpoint 0x%02x Reset failed. Can be ignored if device switched OK. OK, device was reset I contacted the manufacturer "i-onik"; they were quick to release the kernel source code - even the whole firmware sources - which was commendable, but no source code of "usbdongle". They promised to take care of it, but I haven't heard of them in six weeks. I have sent them a reminder but won't hold my breath. Here is a link to a package with the binary files in question: http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usbdongle.zip Here is a link to the source code of usb_modeswitch from 2011: http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb-modeswitch-1.1.7.tar.bz2 I chose this older version because there was a copyright notice in "libusbdongle.so" stating: (C), 2011-2012 Cathay Communication Co., LTD. Sorry for the lengthy message and thanks for the review! Best regards, Josua Dietze
