GPL violation on BongoSurfer

[Clemens Ladisch]

Pascal wrote:
> The programs are not really functional, because they obviously did bad
> things like sed 's/bongosurfer/colorsurfer/g' on the sources, but that's
> another story ;)

Did they only change the program name (perfectly legal), or did they
remove information about the original author(s) (_very_ illegal)?

> All the sources were only for the major release of colorsurfer.
> Despite our requests, we didn't receive any sources for the derived
> versions sold to the ISPs mentioned above.

The ISP versions are distributed by the ISPs, so it's they who are
responsible for distributing/offering the source code.

> How long should we wait to get the complete sources of ColorSurfer and
> all it's derivatives?

Whatever is appropriate for this task.  ;-)

> What would be the next step to take if our requests fail?

Talk to a lawyer and sue them.

It's possible that "First Internet Invest Ltd" does not have enough
assets to pay your expenses and damages, but it might be possible to
make the CEO personally liable (since it looks as if he did the
violation).  Try asking in a newsgroup like de.soc.recht.misc.


HTH
Clemens