5 ms·

Every time I see these guys pop up, I'm reminded of the time a decade ago where they literally copied my .NET profiler (nprof) into their "brand new" .NET profi

Every time I see these guys pop up, I'm reminded of the time a decade ago where they literally copied my .NET profiler (nprof) into their "brand new" .NET profiling product at the time and just shipped it. No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. Very disappointing of them.

fabiensanglard 7y ago
What do you claim they copied? The GUI, the features?
- mmastrac 7y ago
  Code from the open-source nprof project made up a good chunk of dotTrace (confirmed via decompilation at the time).
  - wldlyinaccurate 7y ago
    Which licence did you distribute the code with? Surely there's solid grounds for a legal case if the licence didn't permit commercial use?
    - mmastrac 7y ago
      I wasn't really clear on licensing back then and it looks like I had a few GPL headers in the source. EDIT: it was clearer than I thought - v0.4 [1] has an explicit GPL 2.0 COPYING.txt in the root. [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/nprof/files/OldFiles/nprof-0.4-alpha-src.zip/download https://sourceforge.net/projects/nprof/files/OldFiles/nprof-...
      - zmzrr 7y ago
        So this is the usual "I'm peeved that I chose the wrong licence and someone made money off my project". Aha.
        ncallaway 7y ago
        This seems wrong. It turned out that they specified GPL, and so the redistributor is violating the license. However, if they hadn't specified a license, then the product would be unlicensed. Which would make the redistributor directly violating their copyright. If source code doesn't come with a license, that doesn't make it fair game. That makes it unusable by any third-parties.
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        GPL is GPL. If their thing isn't, they are in violation. They now have deep pockets. For anything that had no license spelled out, they had and have no license to use it at all. To be clear: they appear to have no license to distribute your code today, and owe you damages for all the distribution they have done thus far that was not licensed.
        dannyw 7y ago
        To add, if they are still selling it today then it may reset any statue of limitations. I would recommend that you talk to a lawyer, and get them to draft Jetbrains a letter.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        There is no statute of limitations for copyright violation, to my knowledge. I gather Germany imposes some pretty draconian time limits for initiating enforcement, but have not heard of others.
      - zenhack 7y ago
        As others have pointed out, if they weren't distributing source and passing on the license, this is a blatant copyright violation, and what they were (still are?) doing is illegal. If you're at all interested in doing anything about it, copyleft.org has a bunch of useful resources.
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    That sucks. Are you just looking for an apology?
    - mmastrac 7y ago
      Given that it's 15 years later, I'm sure that would be fine. It was really just disappointing for a me in his mid-20s.
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        No. Contempt should be accountable.
      - xnyan 7y ago
        If they've done it to you, it's very possible they've done/do it to others. You should post your story. JetBrains is not a little operation and should to be held to account if they've done what you've said.
kevingadd 7y ago
Pretty standard in the .NET ecosystem, unfortunately. I had a similar experience with multiple tools vendors repackaging my stuff for free as the foundation of their product. The only time I ever got a sponsorship offer or even bug fix contributions was a while after I had stopped doing their work for them for free.
- mmastrac 7y ago
  Yeah. That soured me on the .NET ecosystem a lot. I was a fan of VS.NET/Resharper at the time (pretty groundbreaking). I moved on to Java/Linux over the next couple years.
- manigandham 7y ago
  This doesn't have anything to do with .NET specifically. It can and does happen everywhere.
sah2ed 7y ago
> No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. I think the important question here is did they do this in violation of the open source license you had adopted as at the time the alleged infraction took place?
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Something can be legal and still be incredibly tasteless. If you keep lifting major open source tooling as the basis of your product without contributing, you're eventually going to exhaust the patience and free time of the people working on it. Think about it this way: When Linus started working on Linux and decided to release it under the GPL, was it because he wanted companies to use it as the basis of billion-dollar revenues without sponsoring development or compensating him for his work? Lots of people start contributing to open source at a smaller scale, where it's just individuals and small businesses and non-profit orgs sharing with each other, but it becomes kind of a different matter when a company has dozens or hundreds of millions to throw around and doesn't share back. At least in the case of Linux it is well-funded now but there are other cases where core infra has still suffered - you can find recent stories about how the maintainer of NTP struggled to pay rent even though massive companies rely on it.
  - sah2ed 7y ago
    If you think doing so is tasteless, you are clearly approaching this with a social lens and I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions. I chose to approach this with an economic lens, hence the question of whether the original license was permissive, which is the green-light that allows all commercial exploitations to not appear illegal in the eyes of the law. Open source is one of those activities where developers, who are no less human than non-developers, interleave social norms with market norms. As far as humans go, social & market/economic norms don’t mix very well [0], so an unfortunate side effect of a lot of open source projects is that our expectations as humans get routinely violated due to the unnatural mix, as your example of the open source NTP developer in near penury clearly illustrates. [0] https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Social-Norms-vs-Market-Norms.png https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Soci...
mshafirov 7y ago
JetBrains CEO here At the time, we had a student working on the project and they used a couple of classes from NProf code for loading the profiler under IIS. This was done incorrectly as it was not in compliance with the GPL license. This was brought to our attention on March 18th 2005, and after careful examination we responded on March 21st 2005, following up by removing said code and rewriting it. We indicated this resolution to you and you were satisfied and showed support for JetBrains. We do have reference to the aforementioned interchange between yourself and JetBrains. Should you require a copy, please let us know. We'd like to apologise for this mishap which was a complete oversight, and was remedied as soon as it was brought to our attention. Feel free to reach me out if you have any further questions
- swyx 7y ago
  that is a fantastic response. no coming back from that one. F.
- mmastrac 7y ago
  Thanks for the (second) apology. It looks like some details got fuzzy over 15 years. Apologies on my end for mis-remembering that I already received an apology from the VP of product development at the time. That would be great - I no longer have the email in question as I lost access to that account and virtually all email records from the early 2000s (mmastrac@canada.com, I'm assuming). If you could forward that to matthew@mastracci.com I can have that for my records so I don't forget the details again.

fabiensanglard 7y ago

What do you claim they copied? The GUI, the features?

mmastrac 7y ago
Code from the open-source nprof project made up a good chunk of dotTrace (confirmed via decompilation at the time).
- wldlyinaccurate 7y ago
  Which licence did you distribute the code with? Surely there's solid grounds for a legal case if the licence didn't permit commercial use?
  - mmastrac 7y ago
    I wasn't really clear on licensing back then and it looks like I had a few GPL headers in the source. EDIT: it was clearer than I thought - v0.4 [1] has an explicit GPL 2.0 COPYING.txt in the root. [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/nprof/files/OldFiles/nprof-0.4-alpha-src.zip/download https://sourceforge.net/projects/nprof/files/OldFiles/nprof-...
    - zmzrr 7y ago
      So this is the usual "I'm peeved that I chose the wrong licence and someone made money off my project". Aha.
      - ncallaway 7y ago
        This seems wrong. It turned out that they specified GPL, and so the redistributor is violating the license. However, if they hadn't specified a license, then the product would be unlicensed. Which would make the redistributor directly violating their copyright. If source code doesn't come with a license, that doesn't make it fair game. That makes it unusable by any third-parties.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      GPL is GPL. If their thing isn't, they are in violation. They now have deep pockets. For anything that had no license spelled out, they had and have no license to use it at all. To be clear: they appear to have no license to distribute your code today, and owe you damages for all the distribution they have done thus far that was not licensed.
      - dannyw 7y ago
        To add, if they are still selling it today then it may reset any statue of limitations. I would recommend that you talk to a lawyer, and get them to draft Jetbrains a letter.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        There is no statute of limitations for copyright violation, to my knowledge. I gather Germany imposes some pretty draconian time limits for initiating enforcement, but have not heard of others.
    - zenhack 7y ago
      As others have pointed out, if they weren't distributing source and passing on the license, this is a blatant copyright violation, and what they were (still are?) doing is illegal. If you're at all interested in doing anything about it, copyleft.org has a bunch of useful resources.
- chris_wot 7y ago
  That sucks. Are you just looking for an apology?
  - mmastrac 7y ago
    Given that it's 15 years later, I'm sure that would be fine. It was really just disappointing for a me in his mid-20s.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      No. Contempt should be accountable.
    - xnyan 7y ago
      If they've done it to you, it's very possible they've done/do it to others. You should post your story. JetBrains is not a little operation and should to be held to account if they've done what you've said.

kevingadd 7y ago

Pretty standard in the .NET ecosystem, unfortunately. I had a similar experience with multiple tools vendors repackaging my stuff for free as the foundation of their product. The only time I ever got a sponsorship offer or even bug fix contributions was a while after I had stopped doing their work for them for free.

mmastrac 7y ago
Yeah. That soured me on the .NET ecosystem a lot. I was a fan of VS.NET/Resharper at the time (pretty groundbreaking). I moved on to Java/Linux over the next couple years.
manigandham 7y ago
This doesn't have anything to do with .NET specifically. It can and does happen everywhere.

sah2ed 7y ago

> No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. I think the important question here is did they do this in violation of the open source license you had adopted as at the time the alleged infraction took place?

kevingadd 7y ago
Something can be legal and still be incredibly tasteless. If you keep lifting major open source tooling as the basis of your product without contributing, you're eventually going to exhaust the patience and free time of the people working on it. Think about it this way: When Linus started working on Linux and decided to release it under the GPL, was it because he wanted companies to use it as the basis of billion-dollar revenues without sponsoring development or compensating him for his work? Lots of people start contributing to open source at a smaller scale, where it's just individuals and small businesses and non-profit orgs sharing with each other, but it becomes kind of a different matter when a company has dozens or hundreds of millions to throw around and doesn't share back. At least in the case of Linux it is well-funded now but there are other cases where core infra has still suffered - you can find recent stories about how the maintainer of NTP struggled to pay rent even though massive companies rely on it.
- sah2ed 7y ago
  If you think doing so is tasteless, you are clearly approaching this with a social lens and I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions. I chose to approach this with an economic lens, hence the question of whether the original license was permissive, which is the green-light that allows all commercial exploitations to not appear illegal in the eyes of the law. Open source is one of those activities where developers, who are no less human than non-developers, interleave social norms with market norms. As far as humans go, social & market/economic norms don’t mix very well [0], so an unfortunate side effect of a lot of open source projects is that our expectations as humans get routinely violated due to the unnatural mix, as your example of the open source NTP developer in near penury clearly illustrates. [0] https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Social-Norms-vs-Market-Norms.png https://www.aglobalreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Soci...

mshafirov 7y ago

JetBrains CEO here At the time, we had a student working on the project and they used a couple of classes from NProf code for loading the profiler under IIS. This was done incorrectly as it was not in compliance with the GPL license. This was brought to our attention on March 18th 2005, and after careful examination we responded on March 21st 2005, following up by removing said code and rewriting it. We indicated this resolution to you and you were satisfied and showed support for JetBrains. We do have reference to the aforementioned interchange between yourself and JetBrains. Should you require a copy, please let us know. We'd like to apologise for this mishap which was a complete oversight, and was remedied as soon as it was brought to our attention. Feel free to reach me out if you have any further questions

swyx 7y ago
that is a fantastic response. no coming back from that one. F.
mmastrac 7y ago
Thanks for the (second) apology. It looks like some details got fuzzy over 15 years. Apologies on my end for mis-remembering that I already received an apology from the VP of product development at the time. That would be great - I no longer have the email in question as I lost access to that account and virtually all email records from the early 2000s (mmastrac@canada.com, I'm assuming). If you could forward that to matthew@mastracci.com I can have that for my records so I don't forget the details again.