Illegal Usage of Sipdroid by Gizmo5, Inc.
Resolved
On July 23, 2009 Gizmo5 provided a link to the modified source code at the place that is required by the GPL open source license.
Regarding the missing copyright message we have added additional terms according to GPL section 7 for future cases.
Violations
Gizmo5 published Guava which is based on Sipdroid.
- No source code was offered on their download site.
- The copyright message accessible after first startup of the program start has been removed.
Protecting our Rights
-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: From Sipdroid Open Source Project...
Datum: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:34:55 +0200
Organisation: i-p-tel GmbH
An: press@gizmo5inc.com
Dear sirs,
you published "Guava" in violation of the GNU public license.
Furthermore you removed the copyright notice. This is violating copyright laws.
This is highly abominable because you're stealing intellectual property. Please stop immediately. We will inform legal authorities.
--
Regards,
Pascal Merle
- Sent takedown notice under the DMCA to Google Android team
Reactions
- For a few days Michael Robertson provided a download link for the modified source on his Guava Feedback Forum. The entry has later been hidden from index and search by marking it "other".
Pascal,
We did not publish Guava in violation of the GNU public license. The
about screen says "Guava is based on SIPdroid." and lists all the
copyright holders of the software. I'm not sure why you're telling
people we removed the copyright notices. I guess you want to stir up
controversy. If it helps people find out about SIPdroid and GUAVA then
I'm all for that. I actually appreciate you reaching out reporters and
telling them about GUAVA because it helps get the word out. When
combined with Google Voice it's really a fantastic value for consumers
- a totally free phone with US number for making/receiving calls AND
SMS without paying the carriers. Yeah.
In addition the source code is available at: http://gizmo5.com/guava.tgz
But you already know that and want to stir up controversy. That's cool
by me.
I appreciate your enthusiasm to stand up for open source, but I don't
understand why you didn't just send me email if you had an issue? Or
send an email to the blog http://www.noSIMcard.com ? I'm also a big
believer in open source. I've spent millions of my own money support
open source initiatives and more money from the companies that I've
started and run to support open source. Of course people know I did
Lindows/Linspire and we built lots of code and paid for other code
which went back to the community. A small example is Firefox's
'underline in red when I do a misspelling' - that's code I paid to
have written and gave to Mozilla. Way back at MP3.com we gave money to
support an unknown open source database called Mysql which went onto
bigger things.
The ironic thing is that I tried to contact you at PBXes.org and let
you know about our project but there were no email addresses listed on
your website that I could find. So I tried guessing your address:
pascal@pbxes.org and pascal.merle@pbxes.org and those both bounced. So
then I tried submitting a customer support ticket, but your system is
broken and doesn't allow new users to signup (at least it didn't for
any of the several usernames I tried to register). Sorry you didn't
get a heads-up on our project.
I see the complaints from some about you tying your company pbxes.org
into the software. I see from this thread that some people have a
problem with that. You can't please all the people all the time.
As we stated on the blog, GUAVA is alpha now so lots of issues.
Biggest issue is that the software does not automatically re-register
whenever the net changes or has a hiccup. This causes the software to
become unregistered if you leave it running for awhile or change wifi
networks. We're rewriting the registration portion of the code to put
it in its own thread so it will automatically reconnect if there's a
disturbance in the network. Hope to have that done later this week.
You might want to also look at the code we added to use TCP for
registration in addition to UDP. We've found this often helps traverse
troublesome NATS and routers.
-- MR
- Chris DiBona from Google responded
Hi Pascal and other Sipdroiders.
A couple of things;
1) The Guava package is not in the android market, they host it on
their site.
2) The about box does give credit, and shows the truncated GPL, noting
the copyright holders including siphone, sipdroid, hughes systique,
andoird and university of parma, it.
That's all I wanted to share at this point. It is kind of mistargeted
in that you dmca'd google as we aren't involved with gizmo5 and we
don't host the app on the android market. Did you email michael
robertson over at Gizmo5? He's all over the internet. Press emails
sometimes sit in limbo at companies.
Good luck and happy hacking..
Chris
Claims
Users should not have to jump thru five hoops if they want to get the source code. When taking intellectual property from an open source project one expects a publisher to:
- Mention the original authors right away. In this case only after downloading and completing 5 required of about 10 settings, the menu and copyright box get accessible.
- Offer sources and binary in the same place.
Discussion
A discussion on this issue is held in our developers group.