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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    GPL violation by a software
From:       <durocortorum73-kde1 () yahoo ! fr>
Date:       2005-11-17 9:20:10
Message-ID: 20051117092011.85298.qmail () web26404 ! mail ! ukl ! yahoo ! com
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Hi,

I am sorry if this is the wrong list for reporting GPL violations. If
so, please direct me to the right one.

You can find a software called DECAD using KDE libraries at the
following address:
http://diffractive.optics.free.fr/index.php

But you will not be able to find the sources, and the software is not
accompanied with any GPL license, apart in the "about" box which is due
to the KDE libraries. Many persons have in the past asked for the
sources, but the author has never answered to any of their requests.

Some time ago (several months, maybe 1 year), I asked without success
for the licence in one of the two forums of the website (the DECAD
one). After many people answered in that thread that they had asked for
the code and they never managed to receive even an answer from the
author, I posted yesterday to the thread that if the author did not
provide the sources, he would be violating the  license of KDE and
possibly the one of Qt (he might have a commercial license). I
mentionned the possibility to contact KDE-licensing, Trolltech and
gpl-violation.org. The thread, several months old, was deleted from the
forum.

I would have liked the author to react in a different way. I know of
that GPL violation for more than one year and never warned you because
his software is a freeware, so I thought he is not such a bad guy.
However, the censorship of the forum made me realise that I was wrong.

Having discussed with former collegues of the man, I suspect that he
cannot reveal the source code because it is an aggregation of codes
written by other people (mostly B. Kress, C. Kopp, M. Flury and perhaps
M. Lo), code owned by the University of Strasbourg, and licensed under
some license incompatible with the GPL. Additionally, the author
admitted, in another thread that I cannot find anymore (deleted too?),
that he was using the FFT implementation found in the numerical
recipes. You can actually check this in the software. The numerical
recipes code is not compatible with the GPL either.

I hope you can convince him to respect you copyright.

Sincerely,

Oliv.

PS: I am not a user of his software. I evaluated it in the past, but it
was constantly crashing within a few minutes ... another bad side
effect of closed source I guess.


	

	
		
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