The company I work at bought some rather expensive, specialist

>>61731660
Nigga that's perfectly legal

>guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software
I don't see the problem

>>61731660
What , you say you they bought it , from who??

>>61731660
Contact your lawyer. Alternatively I think the FSF settles cases like this.

>>61731660
gpl-violations.org or contact the fsf if you are sure that they violate the gpl.

>>61731776
>>61731784
The FSF only deals with stuff published by the FSF. They cant otherwise as they dont hold copyright and wouldnt have standing.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html
> Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.

>>61731660
Perfectly legal as long as they display the copyright notices in someplace obscure in their documentation or website.

>>61731736
>>61731762
How so? I'm sure you have to at least continue including the licensing information.

>>61731774
My company ordered a £5000 license to use their software and we got a CD and a license key.

>>61731776
Never had any contact with any lawyers in my life to be honest. I guess there's a first time for everything.

>>61731821
>Perfectly legal as long as they display the copyright notices in someplace obscure in their documentation or website.

This is what I'm wondering about; I don't see anything about it on their site.

I wonder about that; I don't see anything like that on their site and they've snipped out the disclaimer, license information, and my contact info from each of the nine files that they've included from my library. They're otherwise identical to what I have in my repo.

>>61731660
Is this that same thread from a year ago?

>>61731910
>This is what I'm wondering about; I don't see anything about it on their site.
It will be somewhere you cant find it. I had a hell of a time getting source code from Cisco earlier this year. I had to contact TAC (their tech support) who didnt want to talk to me because I didnt have a support contract. After going through half a dozen drones and a manager my request finally got submitted. After 2 months I still had no status updates other than "we're working on it". I finally had to send threatening letters to their general counsel before they got their ass in gear and sent it to me.

All you can do is try calling all their numbers and try to get ahold of someone senior in their organization, or their developers. And if that doesnt work you could sue them. Ask the FSF for a legal referral, preferably one who would work on a contingency basis - he only gets paid if you get paid.

>>61731660
just business, freetard

>>61731660
Check eith the FSF. Maybe they have to publish all their source code.

>>61732038
I don't want to sue anyone over 8k lines of code doing nothing spectacular (it's a glorified parser), especially when I don't really stand to gain anything from it, but this is definitely floating around somewhere between annoying and gratifying.

Should I tell my employer about this at all? I feel like if I write the vendor about it I would have to identify myself anyway...

>>61732131
>I don't want to sue anyone over 8k lines of code doing nothing spectacular
Most enterprise software isnt any spectacular and they sue each other over it all the time. Same goes with patents.

>Should I tell my employer about this at all? I feel like if I write the vendor about it I would have to identify myself anyway...
I wouldn't unless it is for bragging rights. You would have to identify yourself, but i'm guessing a lawyer could make it so they wouldnt contact your employer.

Is this other company anything other than a software vendor to your employer? If so they wont have a lot of pull. I've gotten cease and desist letters (regarding reverse engineering/discovery of security vulnerabilities) sent to my bosses boss before and I didnt get fired because the other company was just one of our vendors.

>>61732131
They stole your work you beta faggot, just kill yourself you massive cuck, seriously

>>61732131
>Should I tell my employer about this at all?

Protip: They won't give a fuck. Not one.

You could try kicking up a storm on twitter and shaming them. Don't say you're the author just "Hey guys I found out propietary software X stole a bunch of code without attribution! They suck!"

I don't see how you personally would ever gain anything from this so there's no real point getting your real world identity involved. IANAL but I don't think you can exactly sue if they just used open source code a little unethically

>>61732311
>>61732221
>Most enterprise software isnt any spectacular and they sue each other over it all the time. Same goes with patents.

The problem is I don't really see anything I could gain from a lawsuit other than them apologising and adding the licensing information back, which seems like a lot of effort from me for very little gain.

>You could try kicking up a storm on twitter and shaming them. Don't say you're the author just "Hey guys I found out propietary software X stole a bunch of code without attribution! They suck!"

They have maybe a few hundred clients worldwide (mostly as SaaS rather than a proper vendor) so I doubt many people would give much of a damn.

Basically what happened was I noticed the program was doing something I remembered working on a while back (I haven't actually touched my library since 2013) so just out of curiosity I tried looking at the internals to see how they are doing - only to discover they're just using my library. Which was gratifying except for the issue of lack of licensing or any attribution...

Just call them up and tell them to list you as a contributor so you can put it on your resume and get a notshit job

>>61732472
>The problem is I don't really see anything I could gain from a lawsuit other than them apologising and adding the licensing information back, which seems like a lot of effort from me for very little gain.
Shekels is what you stand to gain. As I said, talk to them about it, and if that doesnt work talk to an attorney.

>>61732472
Sue them so they have to open source their code and change their license to GPL. Don't be a permissive license cuck, bring more open source software into this world.

>>61732635
>Sue them so they have to open source their code and change their license to GPL

that's not how GPL works nigga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works

>>61732485
>so you can put it on your resume

He can already do that since he owns the bitbucket which will clearly show it was written several years ago.

Just take the hit OP, you learned and improved from writing the code, you should be pleased it was actually useful enough to someone that people all over the world are using it daily.

You can already talk about it in job interviews.
>"I see here you say you've written some open source software that has ended up being widely used by a large number of people. Can you explain a little more about that?"
>"Well it's a funny story actually..."

>>61732658
No, I mean contributing to the product

>>61732687
He's not a contributor to the product any more than the manufacturer of the car I drive to work is a contributor to what I do there.

>>61732560
>talk to an attorney
that likely won't go anywhere as he'd be on commission and likely not win enough to make it worth the effort. I don't remember the name or anything off the top of my head but there's some sort of gpl association for people to turn to for help enforcing the gpl through the court system

>>61732716
They have mentions on a manufacturer's label for the part or in the manual. More importantly they can explicitly say they partnered with x and that their component was included in x car as long as it's not legally protected by nda

>>61731660
You gave away your work for free and now you feel shafted because someone else makes money of it?

Maybe you should've not given it away for free in the first place, dumbo. If I give away some furniture or my clothes, I don't bitch if the person I gave them away to ends up selling them.

>>61732687
>No, I mean contributing to the product

Umm. You're not gonna make a closed source SaaS company suddenly change their ways and open source their work so you can contribute to it just cos you ask them to. Especially one that gives no fucks about even crediting said open source software.

You'll just get a "fuck off" response.

If you continue to pester them, their lawyers will look into it, they'll double check that they're legally gold because of the open license of the code, then you'll get a 2nd "fuck off".

>>61731736
That would be the case if OP's program was licensed under the LGPL.

If you use anything that's licensed under the GNU GPL, you have to release the whole program on the same terms.

Just ask them to list you as a contributor since it's your code

>>61732877
no, see >>61732654

>>61731660
The source is always being distributed with python.