[Serusers] Porta Software vs. AG Projects [open letter]

[Maxim Sobolev]

Folks,

Unfortunately, all our attempts to solve mediaproxy copyright issue have 
failed. AG Projects rejected to put due credit to Porta into it. The AG 
confirms that all ideas in mediaproxy module came from the nathelper 
module, but refuses to include due respect to Porta.

I think that it just have to be solved somehow, since for example, we, 
Porta Software, always have been respecting others' copyrights and 
licenses. While we use SER, Vodida B2BUA, FreeBSD and quite few other 
free software components in our commercial solutions we never pretend to 
our customers that we have written or invented any of them no matter how 
deeply we have to rewrite something to fit our needs. We provide full 
source code including our own modifications to our customers when the 
license requires that.

Apart from that we always try to return our modifications and 
enhancements back to community. Excellent example is nathelper module 
and RTP proxy. While we could keep it in-house, we opted to make it 
available to the whole community under liberal GPL license.

Unfortunately, folks like AG Projects, who don't have the aspiration to 
do something innovative, try to use somebody's else work to cash on it. 
This unfortunately happened with nathelper/rtpproxy. Once they had seen 
that those extensions are in demand they immediately released their own 
version of RTP proxy with better portability and some bugfixes but under 
their commercial license which prevented any free commercial use of it. 
Since RTP proxy is distributed under BSD-like license, we decided that 
it is not necessary to make any noise about it.

But probably it didn't went as smooth as they had hoped, bugs in 
original RTP proxy were identified and fixed quickly, so that there 
probably were not that many customers who wanted to buy AG's version.

Then they decided to cash on publicity: write GPL'ed module based on 
nathelper with some enhancements, but pretend that they hold a full 
copyright on this module. So that they can say loudly that they have 
invented it and can sell it under commercial license if they want 
without taking Porta who did the initial work into account. They found a 
good excuse for a separating their module out: I had asked them to send 
their patch to me before committing change into a nathelper module. Any 
experienced open source/free software person can confirms that such 
peer-review practice is common in open source projects, but AG took an 
offense. It was just an excuse in my opinion.

OK, once their mediaproxy module had been released, I read its source 
code and found that in many places it bears "strange" resemblance to the 
nathelper. However, original nathelper copyright was striped and 
replaced with AG's copyright. I reported this fact to them, asking to 
put due Porta's copyright back, but they said that they have to 
investigate this question.

After several days they replied that they had written mediaproxy module 
from scratch and there was no code taken verbatim from the nathelper 
module into mediaproxy module and asked me to show such piece of code. 
However, when I have shown them such piece of code they quickly 
responded (in private) that they would take this code out. But my main 
point was not to show some particular piece of code, but to show that 
mediaproxy module is just modifiend nathelper module. Modified to the 
degree when it is hard to see original code, but still "derived work" in 
legal terms.

Moreover, they do confirm that they used nathelper source code as a 
reference for their work. In my opinion this gives us sufficient right 
to claim copyright on derived work.

That's the whole story as we see it. Our legal department is currently 
investigating if the matters are sufficient enough for suing AG for 
copyright infringement. However, whatever they decide, I must say the 
following:

- If folks like AG are tolerated by a community it will seriously reduce 
our (and probably others') incentive to release source code as free 
software. Respect is the only gain we as a company have from releasing 
our code/ideas as free software, if there will be many folks like AG, 
who will take our code/ideas, obfuscate it and say that they are the 
authors we won't get any respect. Obviously in such world we are better 
off to keep our code/ideas closed.

- I am really frustrated by their "embrace and extend" tactics. This is 
the first time in my long free software life when somebody does 
something like that with my code/ideas.

Regards,

Maxim Sobolev
Director of Product Management
Porta Software Ltd