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
Hi Craig
Out of interest do you have any thoughts on my proposal in my last post on page 11?
Regards JB
@Martin you can find a list here http://planner.ardupilot.com/wiki/common-commercial-support
There are also a bunch of other companies including mine who are not listed. If you need assistance please contact me and I will steer you in the right direction.
@Rob,
I think 3DR or some developers could and should offer paid support for customers who need to get their issues resolved fast. As more and more companies are integrating Pixhawk into their products they are willing to pay to get the issues resolved fast without having to wait for someone to reply to them in the forums.
Sniff!!!, but I'm shure you are going to have the best luck in what you start, don't forget to visit the forum time to time, ;) Eh!! and let us to know if you continue in this market with your oun company.
@JB, I agree. I think there should be a process whereby the public shaming screws are turned a little more slowly.
@Cala: Yes, it is true, that some of the higher prices people paid to 3DR was going to support the Ardupilot developers directly. Just over a year ago, I quit my career as a mechanical engineer to pursue Ardupilot development and community support full time, with the support of 3DR. However, that has recently ended, and I am now forced to find other sources of income. I'm hoping to still be able to turn this into a successful career in the open-source UAV industry. However, nothing is certain, and I may have to return to my old line of work. In either case, it is most likely that my general community-focused efforts will be ending. Best case, I will be one of the companies using the software, and contributing back to it any improvements that I make. But the days of answering questions, analyzing logs, and trying to improve the general code will be ending.
Thank's Jani for the information.
Congrats to all.
As Craig said, 3DR and jDrones have a really long history together as both of us were created about the same time and jDrones is original creator of whole ArduCopter concept in forms of frames, motors, assembly guides and more. While we were in charge of ArduCopter development, we (Jani, Ted, Jose) even created first 2 generations of flight software (ArduCopter and ArduCopterNG) and are the first company to start to sell ArduCopters as fully assembled kits as that time due 3DR was not able to sell them assembled directly from USA because of legal issues.
We also created famous MinimOSD together with Sandro and we still continue support this whole project in many ways. One of those ways is DroneCode project where we are one of the founding- and active members.
I have seen many companies to use systems what this magnificent groups has been able to create and I hate when people just come and rape our work.
It's is great to see that another company turns from bad to good and starts to commit their updates to this project.
Mr. Jani Hirvinen, Former ArduCopter lead
CEO, jDrones / Bangkok / Thailand
DroneCode-Project, member/co-founder
http://diydrones.com/profile/jpkh
http://diydrones.com/profile/JJ
http://diydrones.com/profile/SandroBenigno
http://dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/history-of-ardupilot/
http://diydrones.com/photo/album/listForOwner?screenName=2ptmf1gmar3aa
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arducopter-design-concept
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arducopter-unboxing
Nice to see this wrapped up within a few days.
However, like foxilla pointed out as well, going forward I'd like to see some sort of official pre-warning being given to "violators" before the online bullying starts. Maybe make up a compliance list of possible non-conformists where they get a chance to address the issues by officially putting them on notice (via email/letter) of the breaches they've made intentionally or not, prior to listing them publicly. That way everyone gets a chance to comply without the need for a public, possibly permanent, internet shaming.
Potentially one could list the "known" conformists, and those being "investigated" listed as "unknown" status until they've been given various opportunities to conform via the notices, and if they still do not conform to be listed as a "licence breach" and why. A review and complaint process would also help.
Once the issues are remedied will this blog be removed or will it remain on permanent internet record? Removing the badge only allows Bill to post in DIYD again without the fairly aggressive term "violator" coming up (which makes it sound like a sexual offender IMHO). It hasn't been waybacked yet from what I can tell, so there is still a avenue for the posts to be removed before it could be considered defamatory, especially so now that an effort is being made to comply. If it was me I would seek legal council before opening up the door for potential damages claims.
I'm not affected by this, nor know Bill or even his store, and I would like to vote to have the blog removed.
If compliance is not achieved a new post can be created, or even this one restarted.
I think the principle intention of the GPL is that the community can share the benefits of the works, but naming and shaming parts of the community, even the non-conforming ones without due process, will ultimately fracture the community as can be seen in these 11 pages of posts. Reconciliation is a better use of resources than war, and giving non-conformists an more official opportunity to remedy the situation can only add to the value of the community development and protect the hard work of the developers and contributors.
Regards JB
@Rob, thank's for response, I read something like your history from another developer and wrote to Hobby king asking for support him but never response, for latest years we only can buy things from China for Argentine public politicies but now that is changing and is interesting to have a list of shops that are supporting the proyect, I bougth a pixhawk because people than you exist, I'm, with an empty Pixhawk can't do nothing and don't buy it.
I think that if all of us pay a few extra U$s for each controller, tons of controllers that are selling in the hole world can paid "minimum" the materials that developers need to work; at the begining I understood that paying extra money for buying 3dr products support developers but doesn't true too, no?
Congrats to Craig and Bill to solve this issue, I'm shure that Bill is going to have much better income telling his clients the true.
Glad we as a community can put this incident behind us.
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