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Infringing on a GPL License

Thu, Aug 29, 2002; by David Bau.

Here's a bit of an interesting story that is unrolling as we speak.

Readers here may know that I started a little open-source project called Dave's Quick Search Deskbar. Since I never planned to commercialize the tool, and since I also didn't want others to take my work and make it private, I placed it under GPL.

You don't place software under GPL lightly. GPL is what is called an "infectious" license, which means it forces everything it touches to become open-source. In my commercial work, I always need to be quite careful not to include any GPL code, because the GPL license states very explicitly that, if you incorporate code that is under GPL, the resulting program must also be licensed under GPL, which means you must give away the source code and permit derivative works - and usually that makes it hard to make money on it.

In my commercial work, I've devoted enormous amounts of effort in the past to avoid infringing on copyrights and licenses such as GPL. I was one of the authors of Internet Explorer, which was a massive effort to rapidly clone (and exceed) Netscape without seeing or incorporating any of their code, and also of .NET regular expressions, which cloned Perl's regex support without seeing or incorporating any of their code.

But apparently, not everybody is willing to do so much work to write their own code when it is easier to steal somebody else's. And open source code is a tempting target to steal, as I was soon to discover.

In the last year or so, DQSD has evolved into a healthy little online development community with dozens of contributors and over 100,000 user downloads so far. People love that it's free, and the contributors love that it's open-source. A few others have asked for permission to make closed-source derivatives, and I've declined those requests. In the DQSD proejct, I'm trying to encourage a community of developers based on trust, fun, velocity, and so on; this approach is something I've written about before.

A few days ago, we contacted Henry Norr from the SF Chronicle to thank him for his nice article about DQSD. When he replied, he pointed out a bit of software that looks really similar to ours (you can download it at "searchtoolbar.com" - but please don't pay them). The search functionality looks very very very similar to ours. In fact, it looks like they basically took our library of search engine connector code to implement their search functionality. And unlike DQSD, which is free, they're selling it for $29.95, with a limited evaluation period and no source code included.

It was obvious that this was our first case of a GPL license violation. The offending code is not distributed under GPL: in fact, they seem to have gone to some trouble to encrypt and obfuscate the code. But we have verified that DQSD code has been copied; it is in there, and quite a bit of it.

What to do?

Well, taking the advice of license-violations@gnu.org, we've mailed the fellow with a simple query. Basically, "we noticed that your software is derived from ours but isn't under GPL - what's up?".

Now we wait and see.

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Last update: Thursday, August 29, 2002 at 5:32:45 PM
Copyright 2002 - dabbler's weblog