Copyright infringement, please don't put me to jail !!!
Written by Emmanuel Danan
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 06:00
Developing a component is a long and hard work. You are most of the time alone with your code and take inspiration in the work of others, sometimes just for ideas, sometimes directly in their code. One of the big advantages of the GPL licence is that it allows you to reuse some lines, some blocs, some parts or a complete code...
... as long as you leave the original credits in the source code. This is what I did sometimes inside FLEXIcontent, because according to my point of view, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
I received an email yesterday from Sascha, the managing director of YOOtheme, which subject was “Copyright infringement”. What happened? I’ve used the installer code of his Zoo component for the installer of FLEXIcontent. Why? Just because I found it perfect, well written, it was GPL and I thought (and still think) there was no need to write something else. So I added this line to my copyright in the install.php but I forgot it in the uninstall.php.
* This installer was borrowed to YooTheme : www.yootheme.com
This was not enough and I should have preserved the entire original copyright. This means I will replace the above line by the following bloc in the upcoming beta4 release of FLEXIcontent.
* Original install.php file
* @package Zoo Component
* @author YOOtheme http://www.yootheme.com
* @copyright Copyright (C) 2007 - 2009 YOOtheme GmbH
* @license http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html GNU/GPLv2 only
Shame on me, but I didn’t want to spoil anyone from his rights, because I know how hard it is to do this job and I really wouldn’t like it happens to me.
Why this post? Because in nine month of dev, I may have forgotten some mentions in the source code. I really tried to give credits to all people who I borrowed some code in this page http://www.flexicontent.org/credits.
If I missed someone or something, please feel free to send me an email so that I can add you to this credit page and modify the source code copyrights accordingly.
My apologies once again to YOOtheme! I wish also to indicate that the mail Sascha sent over to me was very courteous and he didn't ask me to apologize publically or anything else than adding the original copyright in the source files. Writing this post was important to me, to make everything clear with him and FLEXIcontent users.
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Comments
Depends of the point of view.
I guess, next time, YooTheme and others will borrow some code from flexicontent ;-)
Keep up that amazing work!
Barring absence of any reference to YOOtheme at all or, worse, change in license, Sascha's position seem rather petty to me.
Stop whining about someone not putting in a 'full' copyright block (at least the intention was to give YooTheme credit for the code used) and go answer some of the open posts on the Zoo Forum!
Really, copyrights are important and I understand the importance of them, and apply integrity anytime I utilize a portion of another person work. But, as a YooTheme Zoo user who is looking for an extension that exceeds where Zoo fails (developers interaction with community, answered forum posts, integration with other extensions that use com_content so I myself don't have to reinvent the wheel just to make it work with Zoo, and on..)
I came across this post and can tell you from all the unanswered posts in the YooTheme Zoo forum.. Sascha's time should be spent there.. not sending out emails to developers that obviously have the intention to properly credit YooTheme for the code used. Makes me laugh,... although, in reality, and at 99 Euros a pop for YooTheme Zoo.. it's kinda sad. And, just one reason I wont be buying a Zoo Pro subscription.
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