GPL Violation

1st February 2008, 10:18:28

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Dear Lazyweb,

Someone brought this to my attention recently. I don’t care much for attribution, but he’s stripped the original copyright message and even attached his own terms. I’m officially peeved.

Update: And now, another!

How would you deal with a GPL violation?

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*3 Comments *
  • ravi

    I would suggest you to target at his prime motive behind plagiarism — money from Google Adsense!

    Complain to Adsense Abuse and Cc the mail to the webmaster, if you wish you can let him retain the script after duly restoring the copyright and licence notices and continue to have Google Ads on that page and if you don’t want him to make money out of your scripts then make Google remove the ads from that page.

    This is the most effective method of tackling such hijacks, only quirk here is that, if your script violates Google’s ToC then it would be unnecessarily feeding the fire.

    You could also try reporting the Web Host about this “theft”!

  • http://jeremy.visser.name/ Jeremy

    What strikes me as odd is why anybody would bother violating the GPL? I mean, how hard is it to retain the original copyright notice?

  • http://jaidev.info Jaidev

    Those two are old versions which don’t work with gmail 2.0.

    @ravi:
    Google is quite liberal about greasemonkey, in fact, they re-wrote gmail to help GM scripts!

    @Jeremy:
    Agree 100%. Some pleasure in calling something your own I guess!