GPL violation: GPSconverter vs. GPSBabel

[Robert Lipe]

Hello.

I'm here to ask for help in resolving a license issue.

I'm the creator and lead developer of GPSBabel, a GPL-licensed program
that's reasonably popular and available at http://www.gpsbabel.org.   This
program converts between something like 130 file formats and communicates
with over a hundred different GPS receivers.   The list of formats, as you
might expect, contains the big names in that market but also has a rather
unique combination of eclectic formats.

I was recently searching for something on the internet and was surprised to
find another program supported more than one of these eclectic formats.   I
looked more carefully and found the list of supported was a subset of those
supported by GPSBabel.

I studied the program at http://mcrenox.com.ar/gpsconverter/.  There is no
doubt that substantial part of this program is GPSBabel.  Undocumented
features in GPSBabel are clearly visible in the executable.  Typos and
unique spacing/punctuation that originated in GPSBabel are similarly visible
in the gpsconvt.exe distributed.

 strings gpsconvt.exe | egrep "(initialise|nuke)"
%s -x nuketypes%s
nuketypes
nukewpt
nuke_placer
WBT-100/200: Can't initialise port "%s"
0Force selected GPS data types (nuketypes filter)

strings gpsbabel| egrep "(initialise|nuke)"
nuketypes
nuke_placer
WBT-100/200: Can't initialise port "%s"
nuketrk
nukerte
nukewpt

The contributor of the Wintec module was British.  We added the nuketrk and
nukerte later. :-)


Of the 829 strings in gpsconvt.exe that are 50 bytes or longer, 724 of them
appear identically in GPSBabel.   But some strings don't match exacly.
Here's one that's different, along with the one before and after it.

main: Invalid point in time to call 'pop_args'
GPSconvt Version %s. http:/www.mcrenox.com.ar
    %s [options] -i INTYPE -f INFILE -o OUTTYPE -F OUTFILE

vs
main: Invalid point in time to call 'pop_args'
GPSBabel Version %s.  http://www.gpsbabel.org:
    %s [options] -i INTYPE -f INFILE [filter] -o OUTTYPE -F OUTFILE

So this seems to go beyond "oops, I forgot to include COPYING" and into the
land of consciously scrubbing code to obscure its origin.

I could go on, but it's pretty clear that this program, uuuuh, liberated the
GPSBabel source.  However, this program is sold for 30 Euro and Licensed
"single user, single machine" with no copy of of the GPL and no mention of
source availability.   I'd like that to not happen.

Can this crowd please advise how to best dispose of this problem?   I'm a
mere programmer and don't know enough about international law on
copyright/licensing issues to know if I have a right to be more than annoyed
here or if there are corrective actions that are cost-effective.

The contact info given on their web site is:

      Xxxxxxxxxx
      Privacy of Peersonal
      Data made us remove the   
      entire address 
      AR
      Phone: 00-123-4567980
      Email: webmaster mcrenox.com.ar


Thanx in advance for any help offered.
RJL
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