So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool.
The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz".
The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it.
Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on.
Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?
Check the FSF's violations of GNU licenses page. You can also email the FSF's licensing and compliance lab at licensing@fsf.org and our team would be happy to assist.
Thanks! I'll do that if my last-ditch effort to knock some sense into them doesn't work.
I have a solution but it is going to remain unsaid here . Good day to you sir .
And why leave them nameless? Name and shame. You can get multiple people asking at that point and apply more pressure.
Because I'm not interested in being sued for defamation. Even if I'm totally right and they're totally wrong, they'll bury me in legal fees. I'm not rich enough to afford the law.
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have anti-SLAPP laws which render a baseless defamation lawsuit against you into a blessing which you can turn around, counter sue for, and end up with a nice payday.
Not necessarily cash, but definitely a bit of luck. Some lawyers, if they think a case is guaranteed to go your way, will do the work for free in exchange for receiving a portion of the damages the final judgement will award you. Even rarer, some lawyers care enough about some issues on a personal level that they'll work for free, or reduced rates, on certain cases.
In this case, I'm not sure there are any damages whatsoever to award to OP - a "win" is forcing the company to abide by the GPL, not pay up money. The EFF and the FSF, as others have brought up, are probably the best bet to find lawyers that would work on this case for the outcome instead of the pay.
There a simple incantation u can mutter its the same shield the press uses its called "allegedly". Otherwise talk to the press themselves doesnt matter who even if they are fucking tiny af doesnt matter then post the link to said article everywhere.
Idk if you can say allegedly, when you're the person doing the allegation 🤔
Not to mention, OP didn't specify where they live. Who knows defamation law for the whole world?
I'm pretty sure nobody here knows who you are. Say the name, and some of us will just make this company's life a living he'll by spamming them to give us the source. Win - win (except for that POS company)and you remain anonymous. What are they going to do, sue your Lemmy handle?
That's flawed logic. The company would pretty easily know who has been emailing to request the source code for that specific tool in the timeline just before this post. The lemmy profile may be anonymous, but I doubt OP's emails were.
Why would anyone mention anyone was emailing them? I'm talking about just doing the same without any type of other info.
Well the context was a concern about a defamation suit resulting from this post. If the company never found this post then the anonymity of the poster is irrelevant anyway. The company could easily tell who made this post based on the timing of their already existing email correspondance seeing as this is clearly not a request they receive often.
Conclusion of this thread:
It took a mightly long time, but the company eventually coughed up the source code. They sent me a big ZIP with an large git repo full of uncommitted changes and a bunch of comments and temp files that really shouldn't leave the company 🙂 Clearly some engineer just zipped up the local repo on his hard disk without doing any cleanup.
So they complied with the GPL in the end. Just the bare minimum - i.e. providing the source code on request and nothing mode. I wish they put it up in their Github but they don't want to do that apparently. I'll clean up the embarrassing files and comments and put it up in mine.
