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What to do when a giant company refuses to honor a GPL claim? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@ExtremeDullard just publish everything, they gave it to you under GPL so you can. Sounds like they deserve all the embarrassment they can get.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nah... It's not a matter of embarrassing the company, it's out of decency for the people who work(ed) there. There's stuff like "This shit is why Stu was fired - Phil" or "Best leave this out of the repo for now as I don't want to be included in the next round of downsizing - Tom" this would make Stu, Phil and Tom look bad and possibly hurt their careers. And it would advertise that whoever prepared this ZIP file for me didn't bother sanitizing company confidential information out of it, possibly putting their job on the line too.

The code is GPL, and I consider the git history part of the code. The rest is inappropriate and potentially hurtful to people who didn't do anything to deserve grief.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

@ExtremeDullard You are too kind and thoughtful, they really don't deserve you. A company is just a collection of the people who work there. Maybe the reason why they violated GPL in the first place is because Stu, Phil and Tom didn't care about their work at all. The comments paint a picture of a toxic work environment, and again, that's just the result of the people working there. Good people need to leave bad companies, it's the only way to let the bad die without hurting the good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

It's not kindness 🙂 I only made a GPL claim. All I want is the stuff that the GPL entitles me to have. The rest is off-topic and - as you say - toxic. Nobody needs the off-topic stuff in the Github repo I'll post the GPL code to: it's about the code, not the people or whatever drama happened at their workplace.