Folks,
Unfortunately, all our attempts to solve mediaproxy copyright issue have failed. AG Projects rejected to put due credit to Porta into it. The AG confirms that all ideas in mediaproxy module came from the nathelper module, but refuses to include due respect to Porta.
I think that it just have to be solved somehow, since for example, we, Porta Software, always have been respecting others' copyrights and licenses. While we use SER, Vodida B2BUA, FreeBSD and quite few other free software components in our commercial solutions we never pretend to our customers that we have written or invented any of them no matter how deeply we have to rewrite something to fit our needs. We provide full source code including our own modifications to our customers when the license requires that.
Apart from that we always try to return our modifications and enhancements back to community. Excellent example is nathelper module and RTP proxy. While we could keep it in-house, we opted to make it available to the whole community under liberal GPL license.
Unfortunately, folks like AG Projects, who don't have the aspiration to do something innovative, try to use somebody's else work to cash on it. This unfortunately happened with nathelper/rtpproxy. Once they had seen that those extensions are in demand they immediately released their own version of RTP proxy with better portability and some bugfixes but under their commercial license which prevented any free commercial use of it. Since RTP proxy is distributed under BSD-like license, we decided that it is not necessary to make any noise about it.
But probably it didn't went as smooth as they had hoped, bugs in original RTP proxy were identified and fixed quickly, so that there probably were not that many customers who wanted to buy AG's version.
Then they decided to cash on publicity: write GPL'ed module based on nathelper with some enhancements, but pretend that they hold a full copyright on this module. So that they can say loudly that they have invented it and can sell it under commercial license if they want without taking Porta who did the initial work into account. They found a good excuse for a separating their module out: I had asked them to send their patch to me before committing change into a nathelper module. Any experienced open source/free software person can confirms that such peer-review practice is common in open source projects, but AG took an offense. It was just an excuse in my opinion.
OK, once their mediaproxy module had been released, I read its source code and found that in many places it bears "strange" resemblance to the nathelper. However, original nathelper copyright was striped and replaced with AG's copyright. I reported this fact to them, asking to put due Porta's copyright back, but they said that they have to investigate this question.
After several days they replied that they had written mediaproxy module from scratch and there was no code taken verbatim from the nathelper module into mediaproxy module and asked me to show such piece of code. However, when I have shown them such piece of code they quickly responded (in private) that they would take this code out. But my main point was not to show some particular piece of code, but to show that mediaproxy module is just modifiend nathelper module. Modified to the degree when it is hard to see original code, but still "derived work" in legal terms.
Moreover, they do confirm that they used nathelper source code as a reference for their work. In my opinion this gives us sufficient right to claim copyright on derived work.
That's the whole story as we see it. Our legal department is currently investigating if the matters are sufficient enough for suing AG for copyright infringement. However, whatever they decide, I must say the following:
- If folks like AG are tolerated by a community it will seriously reduce our (and probably others') incentive to release source code as free software. Respect is the only gain we as a company have from releasing our code/ideas as free software, if there will be many folks like AG, who will take our code/ideas, obfuscate it and say that they are the authors we won't get any respect. Obviously in such world we are better off to keep our code/ideas closed.
- I am really frustrated by their "embrace and extend" tactics. This is the first time in my long free software life when somebody does something like that with my code/ideas.
Regards,
Maxim Sobolev Director of Product Management Porta Software Ltd
Maxim,
let me quickly respond, even that's not a final reply yet.
We definitely acknowledge this is indeed a very serious situation and we will make a position on this. Please allow some time though -- the iptel team is currently heavily traveling and it is difficult for us to jointly review the situation and conclude with a position statement and or other actions.
I am personaly very thankful for your contributions and the way you have been contributing.
-jiri
At 12:01 AM 3/25/2004, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
Folks,
Unfortunately, all our attempts to solve mediaproxy copyright issue have failed. AG Projects rejected to put due credit to Porta into it. The AG confirms that all ideas in mediaproxy module came from the nathelper module, but refuses to include due respect to Porta.
I think that it just have to be solved somehow, since for example, we, Porta Software, always have been respecting others' copyrights and licenses. While we use SER, Vodida B2BUA, FreeBSD and quite few other free software components in our commercial solutions we never pretend to our customers that we have written or invented any of them no matter how deeply we have to rewrite something to fit our needs. We provide full source code including our own modifications to our customers when the license requires that.
Apart from that we always try to return our modifications and enhancements back to community. Excellent example is nathelper module and RTP proxy. While we could keep it in-house, we opted to make it available to the whole community under liberal GPL license.
Unfortunately, folks like AG Projects, who don't have the aspiration to do something innovative, try to use somebody's else work to cash on it. This unfortunately happened with nathelper/rtpproxy. Once they had seen that those extensions are in demand they immediately released their own version of RTP proxy with better portability and some bugfixes but under their commercial license which prevented any free commercial use of it. Since RTP proxy is distributed under BSD-like license, we decided that it is not necessary to make any noise about it.
But probably it didn't went as smooth as they had hoped, bugs in original RTP proxy were identified and fixed quickly, so that there probably were not that many customers who wanted to buy AG's version.
Then they decided to cash on publicity: write GPL'ed module based on nathelper with some enhancements, but pretend that they hold a full copyright on this module. So that they can say loudly that they have invented it and can sell it under commercial license if they want without taking Porta who did the initial work into account. They found a good excuse for a separating their module out: I had asked them to send their patch to me before committing change into a nathelper module. Any experienced open source/free software person can confirms that such peer-review practice is common in open source projects, but AG took an offense. It was just an excuse in my opinion.
OK, once their mediaproxy module had been released, I read its source code and found that in many places it bears "strange" resemblance to the nathelper. However, original nathelper copyright was striped and replaced with AG's copyright. I reported this fact to them, asking to put due Porta's copyright back, but they said that they have to investigate this question.
After several days they replied that they had written mediaproxy module from scratch and there was no code taken verbatim from the nathelper module into mediaproxy module and asked me to show such piece of code. However, when I have shown them such piece of code they quickly responded (in private) that they would take this code out. But my main point was not to show some particular piece of code, but to show that mediaproxy module is just modifiend nathelper module. Modified to the degree when it is hard to see original code, but still "derived work" in legal terms.
Moreover, they do confirm that they used nathelper source code as a reference for their work. In my opinion this gives us sufficient right to claim copyright on derived work.
That's the whole story as we see it. Our legal department is currently investigating if the matters are sufficient enough for suing AG for copyright infringement. However, whatever they decide, I must say the following:
If folks like AG are tolerated by a community it will seriously reduce our (and probably others') incentive to release source code as free software. Respect is the only gain we as a company have from releasing our code/ideas as free software, if there will be many folks like AG, who will take our code/ideas, obfuscate it and say that they are the authors we won't get any respect. Obviously in such world we are better off to keep our code/ideas closed.
I am really frustrated by their "embrace and extend" tactics. This is the first time in my long free software life when somebody does something like that with my code/ideas.
Regards,
Maxim Sobolev Director of Product Management Porta Software Ltd
Serdev mailing list serdev@lists.iptel.org http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serdev
-- Jiri Kuthan http://iptel.org/~jiri/
My answer to this open letter is:
AG Projects developed a NAT traversal solution for SER and released the source code under GPL license. The architecture, capabilities and functionality of the software bares no resemblance with existing nathelper/rtpproxy software.
- Local or remote installation - Load balancing and redundancy using DNS SRV records - Handles video or multiple audio streams - Suports chained Media proxies and other SBCs - Display active sessions from multiple servers - Accounting of network traffic - Independent of SER version
While AG Projects software achieves the purpose "NAT traversal", the way we have achieved this does not justify Porta One to claim copyright about the code.
Adrian
On 25 Mar 2004, at 00:01, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
Folks,
Unfortunately, all our attempts to solve mediaproxy copyright issue have failed. AG Projects rejected to put due credit to Porta into it. The AG confirms that all ideas in mediaproxy module came from the nathelper module, but refuses to include due respect to Porta.
I think that it just have to be solved somehow, since for example, we, Porta Software, always have been respecting others' copyrights and licenses. While we use SER, Vodida B2BUA, FreeBSD and quite few other free software components in our commercial solutions we never pretend to our customers that we have written or invented any of them no matter how deeply we have to rewrite something to fit our needs. We provide full source code including our own modifications to our customers when the license requires that.
Apart from that we always try to return our modifications and enhancements back to community. Excellent example is nathelper module and RTP proxy. While we could keep it in-house, we opted to make it available to the whole community under liberal GPL license.
Unfortunately, folks like AG Projects, who don't have the aspiration to do something innovative, try to use somebody's else work to cash on it. This unfortunately happened with nathelper/rtpproxy. Once they had seen that those extensions are in demand they immediately released their own version of RTP proxy with better portability and some bugfixes but under their commercial license which prevented any free commercial use of it. Since RTP proxy is distributed under BSD-like license, we decided that it is not necessary to make any noise about it.
But probably it didn't went as smooth as they had hoped, bugs in original RTP proxy were identified and fixed quickly, so that there probably were not that many customers who wanted to buy AG's version.
Then they decided to cash on publicity: write GPL'ed module based on nathelper with some enhancements, but pretend that they hold a full copyright on this module. So that they can say loudly that they have invented it and can sell it under commercial license if they want without taking Porta who did the initial work into account. They found a good excuse for a separating their module out: I had asked them to send their patch to me before committing change into a nathelper module. Any experienced open source/free software person can confirms that such peer-review practice is common in open source projects, but AG took an offense. It was just an excuse in my opinion.
OK, once their mediaproxy module had been released, I read its source code and found that in many places it bears "strange" resemblance to the nathelper. However, original nathelper copyright was striped and replaced with AG's copyright. I reported this fact to them, asking to put due Porta's copyright back, but they said that they have to investigate this question.
After several days they replied that they had written mediaproxy module from scratch and there was no code taken verbatim from the nathelper module into mediaproxy module and asked me to show such piece of code. However, when I have shown them such piece of code they quickly responded (in private) that they would take this code out. But my main point was not to show some particular piece of code, but to show that mediaproxy module is just modifiend nathelper module. Modified to the degree when it is hard to see original code, but still "derived work" in legal terms.
Moreover, they do confirm that they used nathelper source code as a reference for their work. In my opinion this gives us sufficient right to claim copyright on derived work.
That's the whole story as we see it. Our legal department is currently investigating if the matters are sufficient enough for suing AG for copyright infringement. However, whatever they decide, I must say the following:
- If folks like AG are tolerated by a community it will seriously
reduce our (and probably others') incentive to release source code as free software. Respect is the only gain we as a company have from releasing our code/ideas as free software, if there will be many folks like AG, who will take our code/ideas, obfuscate it and say that they are the authors we won't get any respect. Obviously in such world we are better off to keep our code/ideas closed.
- I am really frustrated by their "embrace and extend" tactics. This
is the first time in my long free software life when somebody does something like that with my code/ideas.
Regards,
Maxim Sobolev Director of Product Management Porta Software Ltd
Serdev mailing list serdev@lists.iptel.org http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serdev
On Mar 25, 2004 at 09:04, Adrian Georgescu ag@ag-projects.com wrote:
My answer to this open letter is:
AG Projects developed a NAT traversal solution for SER and released the source code under GPL license. The architecture, capabilities and functionality of the software bares no resemblance with existing nathelper/rtpproxy software.
- Local or remote installation
- Load balancing and redundancy using DNS SRV records
- Handles video or multiple audio streams
- Suports chained Media proxies and other SBCs
- Display active sessions from multiple servers
- Accounting of network traffic
- Independent of SER version
Ok. let's try to stick to the mediaproxy ser module. Most of the things you said above apply only to your media relay. BTW: nathelper is independent on the ser version, you can use the unstable cvs version with a stable ser cvs without any problems.
The ser module resembles a lot nathelper in functionality. It has some extra features like usage of a list of user agent names to decide whether rtp is symmetric (nathelper uses a different approach, a flag in the force_rtp_proxy), decides whether sip is symmetric or not (again a list of UAs read from a file) and changes or not the port in Contact:. I think its main feature over nathelper is handling of multiple streams. Nathelper features not present in mediaproxy are ipv6 support, bridging mode, more ser config flexibility (like query only mode, good for re-INVITEs).
mediaproxy also uses a different protocol to speak to its media relay. It includes domain names, all sdp streams info, user agent a.s.o.
So you cannot say the mediaproxy module is not similar in functionality with nathelper. From my point of view there are only minor changes (like a lot more parameters send to the media relay). But even the way command are sent to it is the same (opening, connecting, writing and closing an unix stream socket each time a command is sent [which is not a very good ideea IMHO]).
Let's concentrate on the module and whether or not this is a (C) infringement and how to solve this problem in an amiable way.
Andrei
Friends, I think both sides have said what there is to say in this matter. If you continue on this debate on the list, you'll hurt your companies even more, both of you.
Both companies have contributed to the community in a very good way, please try to solve this (off list). We need continued contributions from both of you. We need your Open Source technology and your contributions to the list.
Enough said from a cold a snowy Stockholm :-) Looking forward to Von in Santa Clara, sunny California...
/O
I have only 2 things to say about this:
1. I saw no rejection of your requests. Just an attempt to figure how much of your claims were true and how much was exaggeration. But it seems if you didn't get you request fullfiled 100% in the first 5 minutes, you consider that a rejection. I already said I have problems reading my email, so expect a delay in my replies. It seems to me that we are more willing to cooperate in solving this issue than you are, as you seem not to be willing to accept anything else than your way (even though we think the claims are exaggerated). 2. Please don't spread assumptions about who we are, what we do and what are our motivations. You have not the slightest idea what are you talking about and it will only make you look silly.
On Thursday 25 March 2004 01:01, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
Folks,
Unfortunately, all our attempts to solve mediaproxy copyright issue have failed. AG Projects rejected to put due credit to Porta into it. The AG confirms that all ideas in mediaproxy module came from the nathelper module, but refuses to include due respect to Porta.
I think that it just have to be solved somehow, since for example, we, Porta Software, always have been respecting others' copyrights and licenses. While we use SER, Vodida B2BUA, FreeBSD and quite few other free software components in our commercial solutions we never pretend to our customers that we have written or invented any of them no matter how deeply we have to rewrite something to fit our needs. We provide full source code including our own modifications to our customers when the license requires that.
Apart from that we always try to return our modifications and enhancements back to community. Excellent example is nathelper module and RTP proxy. While we could keep it in-house, we opted to make it available to the whole community under liberal GPL license.
Unfortunately, folks like AG Projects, who don't have the aspiration to do something innovative, try to use somebody's else work to cash on it. This unfortunately happened with nathelper/rtpproxy. Once they had seen that those extensions are in demand they immediately released their own version of RTP proxy with better portability and some bugfixes but under their commercial license which prevented any free commercial use of it. Since RTP proxy is distributed under BSD-like license, we decided that it is not necessary to make any noise about it.
But probably it didn't went as smooth as they had hoped, bugs in original RTP proxy were identified and fixed quickly, so that there probably were not that many customers who wanted to buy AG's version.
Then they decided to cash on publicity: write GPL'ed module based on nathelper with some enhancements, but pretend that they hold a full copyright on this module. So that they can say loudly that they have invented it and can sell it under commercial license if they want without taking Porta who did the initial work into account. They found a good excuse for a separating their module out: I had asked them to send their patch to me before committing change into a nathelper module. Any experienced open source/free software person can confirms that such peer-review practice is common in open source projects, but AG took an offense. It was just an excuse in my opinion.
OK, once their mediaproxy module had been released, I read its source code and found that in many places it bears "strange" resemblance to the nathelper. However, original nathelper copyright was striped and replaced with AG's copyright. I reported this fact to them, asking to put due Porta's copyright back, but they said that they have to investigate this question.
After several days they replied that they had written mediaproxy module from scratch and there was no code taken verbatim from the nathelper module into mediaproxy module and asked me to show such piece of code. However, when I have shown them such piece of code they quickly responded (in private) that they would take this code out. But my main point was not to show some particular piece of code, but to show that mediaproxy module is just modifiend nathelper module. Modified to the degree when it is hard to see original code, but still "derived work" in legal terms.
Moreover, they do confirm that they used nathelper source code as a reference for their work. In my opinion this gives us sufficient right to claim copyright on derived work.
That's the whole story as we see it. Our legal department is currently investigating if the matters are sufficient enough for suing AG for copyright infringement. However, whatever they decide, I must say the following:
- If folks like AG are tolerated by a community it will seriously reduce
our (and probably others') incentive to release source code as free software. Respect is the only gain we as a company have from releasing our code/ideas as free software, if there will be many folks like AG, who will take our code/ideas, obfuscate it and say that they are the authors we won't get any respect. Obviously in such world we are better off to keep our code/ideas closed.
- I am really frustrated by their "embrace and extend" tactics. This is
the first time in my long free software life when somebody does something like that with my code/ideas.
Regards,
Maxim Sobolev Director of Product Management Porta Software Ltd
Serdev mailing list serdev@lists.iptel.org http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serdev
I'm in favor of dicontinuing the discussion related to person and companies and use of expressive vocabulary. This may be difficult with the great involvement people have had but it is very important for moving on. I think the right thing to do is to review the degree of common work and acknowledge it appropriately. (My appologies for not being more specific, but I currently do not have a possibility to do the review job with my collegues instantly.)
-jiri
Dan Pascu wrote:
I have only 2 things to say about this:
- I saw no rejection of your requests. Just an attempt to figure how much of your claims were true and how much was exaggeration. But it seems if you didn't get you request fullfiled 100% in the first 5 minutes, you consider that a rejection. I already said I have problems reading my email, so expect a delay in my replies. It seems to me that we are more willing to cooperate in solving this issue than you are, as you seem not to be willing to accept anything else than your way (even though we think the claims are exaggerated).
Huh? Just yesterday Adrian Georgescu wrote me the following:
<citate>I will not mention Porta One as copyright holder in the code as the code has been designed from scratch to work on other principles than nathelper. I do however congratulate you for the fact that you have been the first to make a NAT traversal solution for SER.</citate>
I, and I think any other person which can read English, would consider it a 100% rejection. If you have problems with communicating with each other in AG that is not my problem. I do not know who is a chief, you or Adrian, so that I took this message as an official AG's position.
Unlike you guys, we *do* respect your work, as I said you approach makes sense, we do not ask to remove your own copyright, but just to put ours next to yours to acknowelege that portions of your code derived from ours.
- Please don't spread assumptions about who we are, what we do and what are our motivations. You have not the slightest idea what are you talking about and it will only make you look silly.
Your actions speak for themselves.
-Maxim
On Thursday 25 March 2004 01:01, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
Folks,
Unfortunately, all our attempts to solve mediaproxy copyright issue have failed. AG Projects rejected to put due credit to Porta into it. The AG confirms that all ideas in mediaproxy module came from the nathelper module, but refuses to include due respect to Porta.
I think that it just have to be solved somehow, since for example, we, Porta Software, always have been respecting others' copyrights and licenses. While we use SER, Vodida B2BUA, FreeBSD and quite few other free software components in our commercial solutions we never pretend to our customers that we have written or invented any of them no matter how deeply we have to rewrite something to fit our needs. We provide full source code including our own modifications to our customers when the license requires that.
Apart from that we always try to return our modifications and enhancements back to community. Excellent example is nathelper module and RTP proxy. While we could keep it in-house, we opted to make it available to the whole community under liberal GPL license.
Unfortunately, folks like AG Projects, who don't have the aspiration to do something innovative, try to use somebody's else work to cash on it. This unfortunately happened with nathelper/rtpproxy. Once they had seen that those extensions are in demand they immediately released their own version of RTP proxy with better portability and some bugfixes but under their commercial license which prevented any free commercial use of it. Since RTP proxy is distributed under BSD-like license, we decided that it is not necessary to make any noise about it.
But probably it didn't went as smooth as they had hoped, bugs in original RTP proxy were identified and fixed quickly, so that there probably were not that many customers who wanted to buy AG's version.
Then they decided to cash on publicity: write GPL'ed module based on nathelper with some enhancements, but pretend that they hold a full copyright on this module. So that they can say loudly that they have invented it and can sell it under commercial license if they want without taking Porta who did the initial work into account. They found a good excuse for a separating their module out: I had asked them to send their patch to me before committing change into a nathelper module. Any experienced open source/free software person can confirms that such peer-review practice is common in open source projects, but AG took an offense. It was just an excuse in my opinion.
OK, once their mediaproxy module had been released, I read its source code and found that in many places it bears "strange" resemblance to the nathelper. However, original nathelper copyright was striped and replaced with AG's copyright. I reported this fact to them, asking to put due Porta's copyright back, but they said that they have to investigate this question.
After several days they replied that they had written mediaproxy module from scratch and there was no code taken verbatim from the nathelper module into mediaproxy module and asked me to show such piece of code. However, when I have shown them such piece of code they quickly responded (in private) that they would take this code out. But my main point was not to show some particular piece of code, but to show that mediaproxy module is just modifiend nathelper module. Modified to the degree when it is hard to see original code, but still "derived work" in legal terms.
Moreover, they do confirm that they used nathelper source code as a reference for their work. In my opinion this gives us sufficient right to claim copyright on derived work.
That's the whole story as we see it. Our legal department is currently investigating if the matters are sufficient enough for suing AG for copyright infringement. However, whatever they decide, I must say the following:
- If folks like AG are tolerated by a community it will seriously reduce
our (and probably others') incentive to release source code as free software. Respect is the only gain we as a company have from releasing our code/ideas as free software, if there will be many folks like AG, who will take our code/ideas, obfuscate it and say that they are the authors we won't get any respect. Obviously in such world we are better off to keep our code/ideas closed.
- I am really frustrated by their "embrace and extend" tactics. This is
the first time in my long free software life when somebody does something like that with my code/ideas.
Regards,
Maxim Sobolev Director of Product Management Porta Software Ltd
Serdev mailing list serdev@lists.iptel.org http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serdev
Official response of the iptel.org SER team to the mediaproxy vs. nathelper dispute. ==================================================
Recently there has been a dispute between the author of the nathelper module, Maxim Sobolev, and Dan Pascu, who contributed mediaproxy module, over a possible copyright infringement.
Our original intention was to let both parties to resolve the dispute internally, without any intervention of a third party. Unfortunately this attempt failed and the dispute was ventilated publicly on the mailing lists.
Because situations like this hurt SIP Express Router project in general, we decided to review the problem by project members who are not connected to any of the mentioned modules. We hope that both parties will consider this statement objective. Our main motivation is to develop a state-of-the-art free SIP server. Unfortunately this goal cannot be reached with pending copyright issues.
We carefully reviewed both, mediaproxy and nathelper modules. From the source code it is evident that mediaproxy module has been based on nathelper module. One example (but not the only one) is pingClients() function in mediaproxy.
In accordance with Section 2 of the General Public License (GPL) the module shall be considered as a work based on nathelper module. The requirements of Section 2 apply to the module as a whole, because it has been published as a single piece of work, no matter of how much code derived from nathelper does the module contain. No parts of the module can be considered reasonably independent.
The GPL allows to distribute modifications and/or work based on a program protected by the GPL under the terms of Section 1 of the license. Section 1 allows to distribute the work provided that appropriate copyright notice is displayed.
mediaproxy is a work based on nathelper module, and nathelper module is protected by the following copyright: (c) 2003 Porta Software Ltd As a derived work mediaproxy module shall display this copyright in addition to copyright of other people or companies.
It is a common practice in the SIP Express Router project (as well as in many other open source projects) to display the copyright notice at the beginning of the file. A copyright notice of the original file shall never be removed when forming a work based on that file.
To satisfy the requirements described above, source files of mediaproxy module containing code derived from nathelper module should display the following copyright notice:
Copyright (C) 2004 Dan Pascu Copyright (C) 2003 Porta Software Ltd
As the maintainer of the official SER code tree and CVS we would like to ask the authors of mediaproxy module to display appropriate copyright notice.
There are two possibilities to do this: - Split the mediaproxy.c file in a file containing the derived code, which will have also Porta's copyright, and a file containing only non-derived code which will have only Dan's copyright. Note that the file containing the derived code can have also Dan's copyright (he has copyright on the modifications).
- Give Porta copyright to the whole mediaproxy.c file (if Dan wishes so).
Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul andrei@iptel.org Jan Janak jan@iptel.org Jiri Kuthan jiri@iptel.org Daniel-Constantin Mierla daniel@iptel.org Bogdan-Andrei Iancu bogdan@iptel.org
-
Adrian Georgescu -
Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul -
Dan Pascu -
Jan Janak -
Jiri Kuthan -
Maxim Sobolev -
Olle E. Johansson