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Problems in Open Source
- __d 6y agoThis is a sad tale. At best, the competitor has behaved very poorly. Their removal of copyright claims in particular is a clear indication of malign intent. But the author is correct in their assessment: the primary purpose of the GPL, and Free or Open Source licenses in general, is to provide a right to modify and distribute to anyone who obtains the software. There is no special protection for the original author(s). Many projects have had a similar experience. Retaining a trademark on the project name gives the holder some parallel rights. Even projects as significant as Linux have had to deal with this.