Are there any "GPL enforcement trolls"?
Are there any "GPL enforcement trolls"?
Posted Jul 25, 2016 17:25 UTC (Mon) by pauly (subscriber, #8132)Parent article: On the boundaries of GPL enforcement
A German lawfirm who has also been working for Harald Welte
had got themselves the Dutch company SecureW2 BV as a client.
Their claim was about SecureW2, an 802.1X supplicant for use with windows (and later, Android).
Originally started around 2000 as an open source project by the Dutch startup Alfa & Ariss,
it enabled the supplicant shipping with Windows XP to do EAP-TTLS-PAP instead of PEAP for 802.1X authentication.
The software was available for some year, as was the source code. To the best of my knowledge,
the last versions of this software (then called EAPsuite) were distributed binary only although they
were still _supposed_ to be GPL.
In 2007, we dropped it altogether and found a way to support PEAP directly, thus making life easier for
Windows users. But we continued to offer that software for download (binary, of course).
Little surprising, download numbers were tiny after that.
In the mean time, SecureW2 BV had taken over the copyright of that software from Alfa & Ariss.
Their claim was that we distributed their GPL'd software without supplying the source code. Given
the historic lack of source availability on their own part, that claim was weak, of course.
What's more, educational use in Germany almost precludes any commercial use, a German
university is much more similar to a state-run authority than to any commercial entity.
After our legal department had made clear that we would not easily give way, the whole thing fizzled out.
It looks like the unclear state of that software had opened up a niche for dubious (or resourceful, as you like)
lawyers where they could at least try to "enforce" and monetize a Pseudo GPL copyright, contradicting
everything that GPL had been created for. To me, this is dangerous grounds.
Cheers, Martin