FreeMedForms information: violation of the GPLv3

[Jérôme Pinguet <jerome@jerome.cc>]

On 08/16/2016 11:37 PM, Eric Maeker wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Firstly, excuse me for beeing so quiet these past few months.
>
> I wanted to inform you that the FreeMedForms project is still alive
> and will release soon a 1.0 version after one year of testing and
> debugging.
>
> The project has just been forked by Jérôme Pinguet. The code and wiki
> are actually reproduced on one other website (a copy/paste effort). As
> he tells me, he wanted to have his own soft for his commercial
> activities and that he will ignore open source users comments and
> wishes... The FreeMedForms community will not support this fork and
> some members of the community asked me to bannish Jérôme Pinguet.
> Nothing is done yet. All his access to the community servers, wiki,
> forum, repositories are currently removed. I think he stole private
> data too. There is a threat, he will probably not respect the GPL
> license terms.
>
> Open source can lead to such a situation, I hope we will find the best
> way to figure this. For sure, the FreeMedForms project is still alive
> and will pursue its efforts !
>
> Freely,
> Éric
> https://www.maeker.fr/
> https://www.freemedforms.com/
>
Hi!

As a follow-up to this libellous email, and particularly the "he will
probably not respect the GPL license terms" part, I just wanted to let
you know that Eric Maeker has released FreeDiams v 1.0.0 and
FreeMedForms v 1.0.0, both GPLv3 software, without releasing the source
code.

FreeMedForms [1] and FreeDiams [2] binaries have been published on
SourceForge but the Source folder of version 1.0.0 remains empty [3].
The source code is not on the usual repository [4] either, because Eric
Maeker has decided to stop publishing his modifications publicly since
August 2016... except for one single commit in January updating the date
of... his copyright[5].

AFAIK, releasing binaries of a GPLv3 program on a web server without
publishing the corresponding source code is a violation of the General
Public License version 3.

At first, I thought it was just a mistake or a small delay, but Eric
Maeker has since stated in a tweet that this is a deliberate decision [6]:

"Next week, FreeMedForms and FreeDiams MacOsX builds then April: Linux.
Source available for approved devs only till end of this process." 12:47
PM - 28 Feb 2017

I don't think there is an "approved devs only" clause in the GPL.

Many people, including me, have contributed to FreeMedForms since 2008
because, thanks to the GPLv3, they were assured that their time, effort
and lines of code would never be appropriated by private interests or
confiscated by the greed of a single individual.

Instead of upholding the ideals of the free software movement, Eric
Maeker has decided to betray the trust of users and contributors and to
break the positive image of the project, just so that my fork FreeHealth
doesn't benefit from the new code (including fixes of bugs that I had
discovered and reported).

"Free"MedForms is not free anymore. It makes me sad more than it makes
me angry.

I will go on with FreeHealth, which is free for real and developed in
the open, and try to salvage the collective creature from the misdeeds
of its original and not so cute creator.

Jérôme Pinguet
https://freehealth.io
https://github.com/FreeHealth/freehealth

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freemedforms/files/FreeMedForms/1.0.0/
[2]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freemedforms/files/FreeDiams/1.0.0/
[3]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freemedforms/files/Source/1.0.0/
[4]: https://github.com/EricMaeker/freemedforms/
[5]:
https://github.com/EricMaeker/freemedforms/commit/ea8e586013b775422c1cc735dded3cbfc8e913a4
[6]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170302020031/https://twitter.com/freemedforms/status/836679300715798529