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
Darius
What are you saying here? What does this have to do about the discussion? NOBODY is talking about Patents, or NDA here. This is a common thing with you, where you seem to steer discussions in weird directions, and I don't know if it's a language issue or what.
Darius, do not continue to misrepresent the GPL laws by way of constructive omission. The full text reads:
This does NOT represent the situation here. If customers are ASKING for the source code, and a vendor is refusing to supply it, that is a violation of the GPL.
public is more than 1 person under patent law
but if you release your patent application under NDA
you never reach 2 persons = public saturation.
So if modified version of software goes to individuals under NDA,
there is no public, making life more complicated.
BTW
This FAQ makes no law.
"
Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement? (#DevelopChangesUnderNDA)
Yes. "
@Darius that is a disingenuous quote. The fuller text is
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedP...
"
Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public? (#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic)
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it.
"
FAQ by GNU doesn't make the law.
I have studied GNU licences as COB at GNA since our president licenced some products to MIT.
Today GNU GPL licences get more and more complicated, so developers write code and
sell applications for Android to make pocket money.
The idea behind GNU was the idea of the Global Village by Ted Turned, CEO at CNN.
If we live in the Global Village we should share our intellectual property for free.
At the same time corporations lived in the Global City, sharing nothing for free.
"Make peace not war"
"Make love, not war"
I can mediate this case with all interested and involved parties
in the best interest of Michael Oborne, developer of Misssion Planner.
There is NO requirement in the GPL license to release the code to anyone but their customers.
At that point if a customer wants to release it to everyone they can do so, but unless you are a customer you have no grounds to ask that they release modified code. The terms and rules of the license are really pretty simple...
There is a long history of people taking open source code, improving it and then marketing their improvements. Unless a subsequent customer whats to release the code there is no path to force release. The only one behaving badly here seems to be Craig, the guy who started the which hunt. You have a statement by the UAS systems principal involved that they release their code to their customers. Unless you can find a customer that purchased stuff from them and then had their request for source refused you hav no grounds to accuse them of violation. You sound like a bunch on whiney children, When you work on an open source project you explicitly give away YOUR developer rights to anyone that abides by the terms of the license you choose. It looks like they have abideed by the license and your bitching anyway.
This sort of unfounded character assassination taints the whole open source movement and causes serious business people, that might help, to go running the other direction as fast as they go. Based on what has been present here it look like there is a good case for liable and I believe based on the text of the license and lack of evidence provided here UAV Solutions would win.
Shame for non creative people to claim pride for other's work, Be innovative, burn some midnight oil and be part of the community. you will benefit more and all.
@Brian, @Craig has tried working with them over a prolonged period of time. This isn't something done on a whim. They have my support in their actions.
I wonder if their customers know they can use the full featured Mission Planner in lieu of the UAV Solutions branded product? Just in case they want additional features that have been removed?
@William, It sounds like your staff may not know your obligations? Some training might be in order. You still can turn this into a win:
1 - Put credits back or consult the dev's on what is reasonable
2 - Ensure the source code is available to any binary recipient (or better yet put it on github so you can give back to the community)
3 - Please inform us how you 'support' the open source community (specifically MP, PX4, etc), if it is just with sales then it sounds like it's more of a benefit to you than the open source community. It's poor form to remove the donation button and then not donate anything to them (assumption on my part - please correct me if I'm incorrect). I know you wouldn't like your branded product to have a donation screen as it will confuse your customers - after all they have paid for it haven't they? If you donated $20 per solution sold I'd be viewing this very differently. I'll be starting a commercial venture this year and I plan to donate additional funds as MP will be my GCS that I'll be using - it's the right thing to do.
Open source or no, it's breathtakingly tacky to slap your logo on someone else's work without first getting express permission from its authors.
And if that weren't enough, from what I can see in that screenshot UAV Solutions even obliterated the donation link!
It's the only protection hardware and software developers have.
It's important that we hold all companies accountable for both the letter and the spirit of the licences!
More on that for a future blog post!
It's very simple to add an open source page with the correct links to a website....
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