Has Corel been violating the GPL for approx 6 months?
Has former copies of the Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation
CD-ROM violated the General Public License?
This seems like a straight forward question but one that
Corel has beat around the bush in answering.
This is going to be a rather lengthy email so I will break
it into six major parts:
1) Questioning Corel's distribution practices in January 2000
2) Questioning Corel's distribution practices in April 2000
3) Corel declairs the situation "corrected" in July 2000
4) Corel's excuses for distribution practices
5) What Corel doesn't seem to be willing to dispute
6) Plan of action to bring about a complette correction
Part 1: January 2000
Corel Corp. has been trying to re-introduce themselves to
industry as a Linux vendor. This process went into full
gear earily this year with the Corel LinuxOS Road Tour. I
was discouraged to find that this "demostration" of what
they where doing seemed to also be a demostration of their
disregard for the General Public License (GPL). By
providing their "Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation CD-ROM" they
where redistributing some 400 packages in Debian package
format which where covered by GPL. But they only supplied
them in binary only format without anything which appeared
to be a written offer of source code. They where able to
supply a t-shirt and a "nurf" style blue cube with a warning
label "not a toy" on it but no written offer of source code.
Well, among the packages appeared to be one that I
contributed too so I notified the Corel employees at the
event that the redistribution terms for my contribution
where not being met and as such redistribution of my
contributions should be halted or the terms complied
with. A set of excuses (which I will get into later) was
provided but in the end I was notified that the situation
would be corrected soon.
Part 2: April 2000
Approximently three months have passed since the "part
1" event where the promise of a correction coming soon was
provided. Yet, at a computer trade show Corel was
continuing distributions of the same "Corel LinuxOS Open
Circulation CD-ROM." Even more interesting was that Michael
Cowpland gave a keynote speech declairing that Corel is
"raising the open-source flag" while his staff was actively
violating one of the classic open source licenses just up
stairs in the same building. Despite the fact that Corel
refused to do the simple act of providing a written offer
they still claimed to be "embrassing" open source.
And my contributions which I cleared stated where to be
removed or the situation corrected, they remained as part of
the 400 some packages which Corel would continue to violated
the redistribution terms of. And again they provided a
standard set of excuses which followed up with a request
that they be contacted via email.Part 3: July 2000
After emailing them did not seem to change Corel's attitude
towards continuing to violated the license (and hence
copyright) on my contributions until around July. Finally,
a staff member of Corel declaired that *ALL* flavors of
Corel LinuxOS including the Open Circulation CD-ROM would
either come with source code or a written offer. What the
"finalizing" email didn't address and Corel still has not
choosen not to address is that they still violated the
copyright when their some of their redistribution methods
failed to meet licensing requirements for approximently half
a year.
Part 4: The excuses
Some popular excuses from Corel employees as to why it
shouldn't matter which aspects of the General Public License
they choose to ignore:
- Corel is an important contributor to open source.
- Corel will continue to be an important contributor to open
source.
- Why do you need Corel to provide a written offer anyways?
- This problem only effects the Open Circulation flavor of
Corel LinuxOS which is just a small number of the LinuxOS
distributed.
- Corel doesn't intend to hide the source code.
- Corel provides the source code on their web site.
Part 5: My claims that Corel seems to leave undisputed
- None of Corel's excuses state something that would
consitute having provided a written offer.
- None of Corel's excuses state something that gives them
the right to wave or disregard sections of the GPL. In
fact, their claim of being an important member of the open
source community should suggest that they would feel a need
to follow GPL compliance in a timely fashion even without
outside influce for them to do so.
- At no point has Corel attempted to claim that near half a
year is an acceptable turn around time for meeting with
licensing conditions on open source software. They have
never attempted to explain why a sticker or other method of
providing a written offer couldn't have been added withen
one month's time or less.
- Corel has not claimed they have had a legal right to
distribute copyrighted works without meeting the licensing
conditions for redistribution, they have only claimed that
this failure on their part shouldn't matter because of the
excuses stated above.
Part 6: A plan of action
Regardless of if Corel intends to or not, they will act as a
model for other companies which decide to join in on getting
involved with Linux. As a model, Corel has been pritty
awful. Michael Cowpland continue to give speechs as to how
Corel "embrasses" open source without ever appologizing for
his company's act of violating the General Public License
for half a year. Rather, they seem to expect a "forgive and
forget" attitude from contributors to Corel LinuxOS since
their violation is now a thing of the past. After all, they
do have a set of excuses why violating the GPL should be
acceptable for near half a year. But with that as a roll
model, we should expect other companies to be self-declaired
"important" contributors and likewise take on a business
practice of temporarily suspending sections of the
GPL. This is not acceptable and I feel the past issues
should still be addressed in some form.
Since talking privately in email with Corel has proven
unfruitful (they refuse to even respond AT ALL now). I
would like to explore a project among GPL developers to file
a lawsuit against Corel. I intend to prove that despite the
fact the GPL provides a method of redistribution for free
that the package still has a monitary value to it and is
still a copyrighted work. Further, I would like to prove
that my own copyrighted contributions which where on the
Corel LinuxOS Open Circulation CD-ROM have a value not less
than $1 per copy. One of the flavors of redistribution
Corel choose did not fall withen the licensing method of
doing redistribution for free, so for those violations of
license should be entitled to damages/royalities. I would
be willing to explore a class action lawsuit if other
contributors to GPL packages which ship on the Corel Open
Circulation CD-ROM wish to also collect royalities for
any unlicensed redistribution conducted by Corel. However,
it is not my intention to make money off this. Any money
rewarded which doesn't go to lawyer fee will hopefully be
donated to the Free Software Foundation. Presently, it is
my belief that legal action is the only way to get Corel to
provide an acceptable responce to the fact that violating
the GPL for six months is not acceptable regardless of how
"important" or your "intentions" might be.
Thanks
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