On Wed, May 26, 2004, Keith M. Hughes wrote: > I've never seen what happens during a GPL violation
Most of the time not that much really happens. When you point out what GPL requires from them they usually fix it right away. Then of course we have the few rotten apples (or maybe I should say fishes:) like Bluefish Wireless (http://bluefishwireless.com) that when asked to provide the source code instead makes threats. James Fisher, the CEO of Bluefish Wireless Inc., sent direct threats to me and "warned" me about contacting their customers to inform them that the binaries they distributed violated our copyright. He even tried to "sell" the source code to us for $15! Why would we want to buy a subset of our own source code? ;-) Later, after we had got legal help from FSF, he also made this statement, "If we end up in court, I will bankrupt these guys." We finally got the source code with their modifications; it wouldn't compile without a few modifications of my own and didn't really build the same binary that they distributed, so in my opinion they haven't done what is required, but we have better things to do than "fight" with losers... They are still using a modified version of the Plucker format in one of their apps. What makes this interesting is that they, when we confronted them about the initial infringement, told us that they had completely written their own parser, but now they all of sudden have saved a lot of time and money by using *our* parser (and document format). Go figure ;-) Anyway, most "GPL violations" are mistakes; they just haven't understood the license. That's not really an excuse, but as long as they fix it when told about what they have to do to comply with the license I'm prepared to "forgive". I guess the rest of the Plucker team have a similar opinion about this, i.e. we rather fix issues in the software than spending time on legal issues ;-) /Mike _______________________________________________ plucker-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
