Sveasoft and the GPL

Posted Apr 7, 2006 20:49 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

There is nothing wrong with having a GPL version lag behind a restricted version ... What's wrong with Sveasoft is that they don't own the copyright to the code, it surprised me a great deal that the FSF didn't have a problem with that.

If FSF didn't have a problem with that, it's just because FSF didn't know. The article says only that FSF doesn't have a problem with the support contract issue (i.e. with Sveasoft offering updates selectively to people who haven't exercised their GPL right to redistribute the code).

Posted Apr 7, 2006 21:42 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

There is nothing wrong with having a GPL version lag behind a restricted version, Aladdin has done it for years and it is a perfectly valid business model.

But Sveasoft is incorporating GPL'd code whose copyrights are owned by others, therefore they have no legal right to use that code under terms more restrictive than the GPL. If they ship a binary to someone, they are obligated to provide source code, as per clause 3 of the GPL. They have three choices, paragraphs 3a, 3b, and 3c. They are not currently in compliance with any of the three. None of this is exempted for preliminary or test releases.

I subscribed to Sveasoft's support just before they announced that they would no longer provide source code even to subscribers. That was clearly 100% non-compliant with the GPL. I requested to cancel my subscription are get a prorated refund; in fact they refunded all of my money. At the time I was satisifed.

Later they announced that they would provide source on request to subscribers, but cancel the subscriber's subscription. This may have been GPL-compliant, but I wasn't impressed, and did not resubscribe.

Unfortunately, Paypal thought I was still a subscriber, and I did not realize that. One year to the day after my first subscription payment, Paypal transferred another $20 from my account to Sveasoft. I told Paypal to cancel the subscription, but they would not refuncd my money. I requested a refund from Sveasoft, and got no reply. So now I've paid $20 but do not have any access to the Sveasoft firmware and support for which I've (unwillingly) paid.

Although Sveasoft does some good work technically, I strongly recommend sticking to either their old public releases, or alternative projects like OpenWRT.