6 ms·

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.

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.