Well, I certainly will not be using Monit ever again should this be accurate. There is no illegal activity from what I can tell, so it's entirely baseless. Are they unclear about what copyright means? Did they hire a lawyer? Does not inspire a lot of confidence.
edit: I've reached out to Monit for an explanation, and will amend if they reply.
Something I've learned over the years is that, when it comes to legal issues, things are rarely black and white. In this case, whether or not Inspeqtr should be required to adhere to the AGPL probably comes down to whether or not it is legally a "derived work". And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there isn't a large body of case law covering the situation where a product is completely re-implemented in a different language. But it certainly seems within reason to say that a court could find that this is a derived work, and therefore in violation unless the AGPL license is used.
Now, whether or not this sort of thing is covered by the spirit of the GPL/AGPL is another question. But it probably is, if you consider the stance of Stallman and the FSF vis-a-vis Free Software. Remember, they basically consider all proprietary software to be a sort of immoral, unethical affront to humanity.
Fair enough point, though I don't feel this is a gray area. The chilling effect alone, being that I could be sued for simply looking at open source code is disturbing. Because that's what it boils down to. Most of our software today is a derivative work of something. I looked at rails code, so does that mean I can never write a web framework lest I be sued?
I'm going to stop you there and suggest that you go do some reading. Your understanding of the legal terminology is too woefully wrong for you to participate in a productive discussion of the issue. You are making sensationalist statements ("sued for simply looking at open source code") that are either extremely misguided or disingenuous. If you want to participate sincerely, you need to put forth more effort to understand what's at issue and to communicate using the correct meaning of technical terms.
That's correct only if the implementation was made without using the original implementation - for example, made off of a common specification, or using only the inputs and outputs of the application. (AKA, a "clean room" implementation)
If the reimplementation was made by perusing the original, it can be considered a derivative work subject to copyright.
How would you ever prove "perusing the original" conclusively?
Sure you could say "so and so downloaded Monit using IP address of 127.0.0.1 at this time", but I don't think that really is legally conclusive.
Unless the alleged violator actually posted public comments about "perusing" the original source code there's not a lot you could do. Unless you do discovery on all of his computers and he didn't delete the Monit source code. To go through all that trouble for a copyright violation on free, open source software seems hardly worth it.
Things are seldom "proven" in court the way they are in mathematics. Instead, Mike would swear that he had never looked at the source code, which, if his lawyer is any good, he will only let him do if it's actually true, because it would open him up to perjury charges. Later, if Monit had evidence this wasn't true, they would present it. IANAL.
The clean room was argued by Google to aid with the justification, but this isn't a requirement of law. An author can read another authors work, and create a novel with similarities.
You might want to find a different example until it is settled. From the wikipedia article on the matter Oracle currently is currently winning From wikipedia: the judgement was released on May 9, 2014. The circuit court reversed the district court on the central issue, holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable. It also ruled for Oracle regarding the small amount of literal copying, holding that it was not de minimis. The case was remanded back to the district court for reconsideration of the fair use defense
Comments
Well, I certainly will not be using Monit ever again should this be accurate. There is no illegal activity from what I can tell, so it's entirely baseless. Are they unclear about what copyright means? Did they hire a lawyer? Does not inspire a lot of confidence.
edit: I've reached out to Monit for an explanation, and will amend if they reply.
Are they unclear about what copyright means?
Something I've learned over the years is that, when it comes to legal issues, things are rarely black and white. In this case, whether or not Inspeqtr should be required to adhere to the AGPL probably comes down to whether or not it is legally a "derived work". And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there isn't a large body of case law covering the situation where a product is completely re-implemented in a different language. But it certainly seems within reason to say that a court could find that this is a derived work, and therefore in violation unless the AGPL license is used.
Now, whether or not this sort of thing is covered by the spirit of the GPL/AGPL is another question. But it probably is, if you consider the stance of Stallman and the FSF vis-a-vis Free Software. Remember, they basically consider all proprietary software to be a sort of immoral, unethical affront to humanity.
Fair enough point, though I don't feel this is a gray area. The chilling effect alone, being that I could be sued for simply looking at open source code is disturbing. Because that's what it boils down to. Most of our software today is a derivative work of something. I looked at rails code, so does that mean I can never write a web framework lest I be sued?
No. At most it means you might have to adhere to the license Rails uses, if your work is sufficiently related to be a derived work.
[deleted]
I'm going to stop you there and suggest that you go do some reading. Your understanding of the legal terminology is too woefully wrong for you to participate in a productive discussion of the issue. You are making sensationalist statements ("sued for simply looking at open source code") that are either extremely misguided or disingenuous. If you want to participate sincerely, you need to put forth more effort to understand what's at issue and to communicate using the correct meaning of technical terms.
What parts of the statements made in the DMCA request are wrong?
re-writing an open source application in a different language is not a copyright violation.
see Oracle v. Google.
That's correct only if the implementation was made without using the original implementation - for example, made off of a common specification, or using only the inputs and outputs of the application. (AKA, a "clean room" implementation)
If the reimplementation was made by perusing the original, it can be considered a derivative work subject to copyright.
How would you ever prove "perusing the original" conclusively?
Sure you could say "so and so downloaded Monit using IP address of 127.0.0.1 at this time", but I don't think that really is legally conclusive.
Unless the alleged violator actually posted public comments about "perusing" the original source code there's not a lot you could do. Unless you do discovery on all of his computers and he didn't delete the Monit source code. To go through all that trouble for a copyright violation on free, open source software seems hardly worth it.
Things are seldom "proven" in court the way they are in mathematics. Instead, Mike would swear that he had never looked at the source code, which, if his lawyer is any good, he will only let him do if it's actually true, because it would open him up to perjury charges. Later, if Monit had evidence this wasn't true, they would present it. IANAL.
The clean room was argued by Google to aid with the justification, but this isn't a requirement of law. An author can read another authors work, and create a novel with similarities.
You might want to find a different example until it is settled. From the wikipedia article on the matter Oracle currently is currently winning From wikipedia: the judgement was released on May 9, 2014. The circuit court reversed the district court on the central issue, holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable. It also ruled for Oracle regarding the small amount of literal copying, holding that it was not de minimis. The case was remanded back to the district court for reconsideration of the fair use defense