Re: [Vcgdotgnu-developers] Copyright issues with GNUVcg project

[James Michael DuPont]

I would like to clear some things up.

1. The copyright message that you see there is not from me, it is a
small mistake made by a collegue of mine who has been working on the
sources. I have originally imported the sources into cvs, as you can
see by the logs and have never changed the copyright. This is a small 
mistake and will be fixed asap.
You write :
> 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!

This is a mistake made by an overzealous person with no bad intent.


2. The sources that are obfuscated are a violation of the gpl.
I dont need to go into that.

3. the sources that are not obfuscated are from georg sander, he gave
them to me. the sources are also 

I have made a snapshot of the sources that I have release, that I have
gotten from mr sander. you can see that those are my checkins.
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/2005/02/vcg-1.30-cvs-snapshot.tgz

in one of the graph layout steps that were obfuscated, here you can see
that the original file was gpled :
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/2005/02/vcg-1.30/vcg-1.30/src/step0.c

You write :
> 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:

It was released under the gpl by the sander to me.
So you can see that I have every right to, since I am a reciepient of
those sources to use them.

4. Under german/european law, you cannot give up your copyright, you
always own it. Just because the university created a company, that is
owned by the professor that georg used to work for, does not mean they
can reverse the fact that he released it.

Please correct me if I have made any mistakes,

Mike


--- Michael Schmidt <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Vcgdotgnu-developers mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/vcgdotgnu-developers
> 


=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/


        
                
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