[Vcgdotgnu-developers] Copyright issues with GNUVcg project

[Michael Schmidt]

Hello,


you are hosting a project called GNUVcg at your sanannah server:

  https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/vcgdotgnu/
  http://www.nongnu.org/vcgdotgnu/

I would like to inform you about some copyright issues with this project.
The problem is that the GNUVcg project is based on the non obfruscated
source code of VCG 1.3, which was never released under the GPL or a 
similar free license by its copyright owner. The questionable source code 
can be found in the projects source CVS:

  http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/vcgdotgnu/vcg-1.30/vcg-1.30/

as well as some new code derived from it:

  http://savannah.nongnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/vcgdotgnu/gnuvcg-05.1/

The project leader James Michael DuPont got the questionable source code 
from Georg Sander - one of the original authors of VCG. The problem is, 
that Georg Sander wrote this code as an _employee_ of Saarland University
(located in Germany). This means - according to German Laws - that the 
copyright for the source code belongs to _Saarland University_ and _not_ 
to Georg Sander or any other author.  Without a written permission 
from Saarland University I must therefore deny the GPL status of the
GNUVcg project. The project should be canceled and restarted from 
scratch.



The only publicly available code of VCG is the obfruscated source code you 
can find at the FTP-Site of Saarland University:

  ftp://ftp.cs.uni-sb.de/pub/graphics/vcg/vcg.tgz

The current Debian package, as well as some other small projects, are 
based on this code. The status of this code was subject of former
discussions (caused by its obfruscation).



Furthermore I would like to burden some bad style of the project
developers. The original sourcecode mentions its authors: Georg Sander, 
Iris Lemke and the Compare Consortium (a former Research Project). In
the derived source code one can only find some references to a copyright 
of James Michael DuPont:

 * This file is part of the GCC XML Node Introspector Project
 * Copyright (C) 2005  James Michael DuPont.

This is a sign of disrespect and off color!

--

Michael Schmidt