GPL violation: GPSconverter vs. GPSBabel

[Filip Onkelinx]

Hi Robert,

I had a similar issue twice a couple of years ago, and the infringing
party was not even answering my emails (one was an individual, the other
a rather large US company). As the website distributing their software
was US based, I sent an DMCA Take-Down notice to both themselves and the
ISP hosting their website. US hosting companies are very strict about
this, and require the infringing party to remove the offending material
immediately or prove that they are the legal copyright owner, if not the
ISP takes down the website (usually within 24 hours or so; if they do
not do this they can be held responsible for illegally distributing
licensed materials)

I still should have the original e-mail if you're looking for an
example, can sent it to you later today (when I'm back home).

Cheers,

F!l!p.



On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 22:13 -0500, Robert Lipe wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> Thanx in advance for any help offered.
> RJL
> 
> 
> 
> 
>