I noticed earlier today that William Davidson was promoting UAV Solutions as a place to purchase telemetry radios. Just as Tridge called out Paul Whitespy from Ready to Fly Quads http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/an-open-letter-to-paul-from-witespy as a license violator I want to make people aware that UAV Solutions is one of the most prolific violators of the open source licenses we use in Ardupilot, Pixhawk, and PX4.
UAV Solutions violates the GPL License on Mission Planner and Ardupilot and they removed Michael Oborne's name from Mission Planner and rebranded it as their own software.
I have spoken with UAV Solutions many times and they have no interest in respecting Michael's work or the efforts of the dev team. They have no interest in respecting the licenses and there is no reason for them to change the way they do business because people buy from them and keep them in business.
Please support the companies who support this project and who respect the developers and the people who have made this project possible. UAV Solutions is not one of those companies.
One of the dev team had a suggestion of creating a badge for open source violators. Mr Davidson you are the first person to be awarded the badge.
Comments
That badge....
Completely disrespectful, trying to pass that off as their own, that is blatant fraud especially considering the so-called pedigree of the company. What do they have to gain by stripping credits like that?
That's true, the only people that will win are the lawyers. Too bad it has to be that way. Looks like it should be an open and shut case.
My humble opinion is that if you want to take it to the courts it takes a lot of money and time, and the results more often than not are controversial at best.
But naming and shaming them may well hurt them in their pocket
Agreed completely Gary.
And they are not the only ones to be doing this. IMO, if the Linux Foundation did their job and sued these companies, maybe the proceeds could go towards sponsoring some more developers to continue working?
Seems to me that this sounds like a clear and intentional violation of the Open Source license and probably of copyright as well.
As such isn't it legally prosecutable, and wouldn't it be to 3DR's direct benefit to do so, especially insofar as they have gone so far out of their way to ensure that they are within the limits of that licensing and have a real fiscal stake in it's enforcement.
In direct patent disputes, this kind of impasse immediately heads to the lawyers, what is different about this?
If, in fact, it is not legally binding, what good is the open source license?
For the most part, corporations do not care one whit about what is right or wrong or fair or not, they only care about what they can get away with to their benefit and to think otherwise is to be utterly naive.
If they are violating the law, hit them where it hurts, if they aren't then we are doing something wrong and all our work is simply up for grabs.
Just a thought!
Gary
I must confess its the first I have heard of it, discussion shall ensue.
Well done Craig, 1, it's BS for them to violate open source rules,
and 2 to have the chuzpe to advertise their products here, moderators should take posts down
Hi Craig/Chris,
You gotta tell it like it is!
Regards,
TCIII AVD
UAV Solutions,
For a company that rakes in big bucks through your military contracts you should be ashamed of yourselves. I have no doubt that while you are ripping off the open source developers of their credit that is due, you are also charging the federal government for the "development" of the items that you have ripped off. I look forward to the day your are caught on your immoral if not illegal activities.
Chris Miser, Falcon Unmanned, Owner
Proud member of Drone Code and support of the Ardupilot Project
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