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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, IBM, Patents, Red Hat at 8:25 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Copyright Plagiarism of XScreenSaver and IBM Red Hat Software Patents.
On Jamie Zawinski’s blog post about people taking his work, XScreenSaver, and putting security holes into it, he also commented that these forks have been plagiarized.
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> Just to add insult to injury, it has recently come to my attention that not only are Gnome-screensaver, Mate-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver buggy and insecure dumpster fires, but they are also in violation of my license and infringing my copyright.
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> XScreenSaver was released under the BSD license, one of the oldest and most permissive of the free software licenses. It turns out, the Gnome-screensaver authors copied large parts of XScreenSaver into their program, removed the BSD license and slapped a GPL license on my code instead — and also removed my name. Rude.
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> If they had asked me, “can you dual-license this code”, I might have said yes. If they had asked, “can we strip your name off and credit your work as (C) William Jon McCann instead”… probably not.
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> Mate-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver, being forks and descendants of Gnome-screensaver, have inherited this license violation and continue to perpetuate it. Every Linux distro is shipping this copyright- and license-infringing code.
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> I eagerly await hearing how they’re going to make this right.
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> -Jamie Zawinski
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When I did a Web search for “William Jon McCann”, a blog that went inactive in 2013 showed he was, in fact, a GNOME developer at some point.
But another site shows that “William Jon McCann” is (or at least was) a Red Hat employee who took out tons of software patents and assigned them to Red Hat, which is now owned by IBM.
Software patents are one of the most horrible aspects of computing. They are typically used to attack competitors, and in many cases, the goal of getting the patent is to make it unclear what the invention allegedly is. In many cases, the patents are bogus, but you come after the victims with so many that they settle figuring that at least some of them will hurt if they go to court and lose.
The Free Software Foundation (1) doesn’t take a strong position on software patents anymore, and (2) has this incestuous relationship with Red Hat (and now IBM) to take code and money. Which may explain why they haven’t strongly come out in opposition to things like this.
It is interesting to know, however, that IBM Red Hat funded plagiarism of source code when they wanted it in GNOME, and that everything that forked GNOME since then is also committing plagiarism.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you need to have BSD-licensed code “dual licensed” to wrap it in the GPL. Proprietary software companies wrap it in proprietary licenses all the time and give people no source code at all.
> “It is interesting to know, however, that IBM Red Hat funded plagiarism of source code when they wanted it in GNOME, and that everything that forked GNOME since then is also committing plagiarism.”
What is absolutely NOT alright is to strip the original author’s name and copyright header off the work and claim that someone else wrote the code.
This is, so unbelievably disgusting. Like, they could have used it without plagiarizing the work, but didn’t.
One wonders what other stolen code is lurking around in GNOME, copyright “William Jon McCann”, or others, and for the benefit of IBM Red Hat.
Also, is it really that hard to do screen locking that you have to copy and paste code you don’t understand, and if it is, then why do you want the same company designing Wayland?
> “The decent thing would be to at least add his name back to the copyright headers”
I don’t think any distribution shipping GNOME, MATE, or Cinnamon Desktops, have contacted JWZ and asked him what he wants to do about this, nor have the desktop projects themselves, nor has IBM.
IBM has managed to violate the freaking BSD license by doing basically the only thing it does not allow. Falsely attributing the work to someone else and then the others have followed along and not done anything to bring themselves out of violation.
The decent thing would be to at least add his name back to the copyright headers. █
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