Carbon XEmacs is infringing various copyrights

[yaseppochi (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

I wish to bring to your attention the fact that Andrew Choi has removed the GPL permissions notice and the copyright notices of the original authors from the file src/carbon-console.c. A comment by Choi says that "All functions in this file are taken from console-qt.cpp", so this is clearly in violation of the terms of the GPL. Although the authors have so far declined to take action, they have not yet granted Choi any license other than the GPL. Choi has been notified of the problem and has twice refused to put the notices in the file.

I ask that you restore the notice to the file in your distribution, either by patch or in a separate README. The GPL boilerplate can be copied from any of the other source files, or simply referred to briefly. The deleted copyright notice is

Copyright (C) 1996 Ben Wing.

Note that the following authorship is given on console-qt.cpp.

Ben Wing: January 1996, for 19.14. Sam Magnuson: April 2002, for 21.5 (Qt version)

This probably means that Sam Magnuson, who was a TrollTech employee, has copyright in that file, and therefore in src/console-carbon.c. We have not yet contacted Magnuson or TrollTech to determine their legal interest or attitude toward Choi's deliberate infringement.

Upon request, I will provide a copy of console-qt.cpp, or you can check out the DEV_QT branch of XEmacs from XEmacs CVS.

I would also like to provide the following context.

It is my belief as a non-lawyer with substantial interest in intellectual property law as it applies to open source that a substantial majority of the Carbon XEmacs port by Choi is derivative of code that he copied from other parts of the XEmacs sources. That is not a threat, or anything like it; I simply want to bring it to your attention that Choi's code uses the "object-oriented" macros developed by Ben Wing (and possibly others) throughout, and therefore is arguably derivative. None of the files Choi has added bear the copyright notices or GPL permissions notices that are required if my interpretation is correct.

Please do not consider this a "demand" or a "threat". At present the XEmacs Review Board (the project's governing body, a self-selected cabal of core developers; nonetheless, membership is fairly open and we regularly add new members) trying to find a way to satisfy both our obligations to our copyright holders who have licensed their code to us under the GPL, and Choi's desire to put no restrictions whatsoever on his code. Although we are all sympathetic in greater or lesser degree to Choi's opposition to copyleft licenses, the largest block of our copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation. Thus we have to be very careful to dot i's and cross t's---that is why we have not incorporated Choi's code into the mainline of XEmacs yet.

We have found no way to legally include his code "as is" (ie, without restoring the GPL to the code we add to XEmacs), but he has publicly and privately bashed us for following the law as we understand it, even though we added notices that his code is public domain, and provided verbatim copies of his patches under his permissions notices. So we are currently at an impasse.

The main copyright holder in the code that Choi has clearly copied is Ben Wing. Ben is currently reserving judgment. His stated desire is to maximize distribution of both his code and Choi's code, as long as his role in creating the code is acknowledged. It is my belief that downstream distributors of Choi's code are at no risk of legal action by XEmacs, and because Ben holds the known relevant copyrights the FSF (which might be more aggressive) has no standing.

[yaseppochi (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

(In reply to comment #0)

I wish to bring to your attention the fact that Andrew Choi has removed the GPL permissions notice and the copyright notices of the original authors from the file src/carbon-console.c. A comment by Choi says that "All functions in this file are taken from console-qt.cpp", so this is clearly in violation of the terms of the GPL. Although the authors have so far declined to take action, they have not yet granted Choi any license other than the GPL.

All authors contacted to date seem inclined to ignore the violation. It would still be nice if distributions downstream of Choi would respect the original authors' rights.

It is my belief as a non-lawyer with substantial interest in intellectual property law as it applies to open source that a substantial majority of the Carbon XEmacs port by Choi is derivative of code that he copied from other parts of the XEmacs sources.

My lawyer (member of the bar, on retainer) agrees. That is still not a threat.

It is my belief that downstream distributors of Choi's code are at no risk of legal action by XEmacs, and because Ben holds the known relevant copyrights the FSF (which might be more aggressive) has no standing.

My lawyer adds that Choi's public domain dedication his derived contribution is probably valid as long as XEmacs authors don't object, so downstream distributors probably don't have to worry about him being able to revoke it on the grounds it was invalid because he was violating his license.

[nox@…]

As this is related to copyrights infringement, I've set the priority to High

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

I think this is no longer an issue as the carbon variant (and thus the offending code) has been removed from xemacs. Port description clearly indicates that GPL applies. Can this be closed?

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

The variant was removed in r31744, for the record.

[(none)]

Milestone Port Bugs deleted