Anybody use Firescope? Seems to be Zabbix

[vhm3]

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice =]

And excellent advice it is (in my non-legal opinion). My opinion, is that since negotations with Firescope had failed, I would pursue this with a vengence, customer or not. The time, and especially the effort you put into Zabbix, is worth a lot, not only to you, but the people that support you. A violation of your property rights, is an extremely serious infraction, which I would highly reccomend pursuing.

Chip

[Alexei]

I hate to deal with this, we are so busy with 1.6 these days!

We did some research today and now I and my colleagues are even more confident that the Firescope product is based on ZABBIX code very much, in contrary to what I heard from them.

It is absolutely clear that our code was intentionally used, yet no credits to ZABBIX were given, to say the least.

Since we still have no reaction, I ask for assistance of ZABBIX community in escalation this case to influential Open Source organizations in order to protect our intellectual property.

I also ask for a legal advice. We are in Europe, it would be nice to see an individual or an organization in the USA to act on behalf of ZABBIX there.

We are doing certain actions as well, I am not sure if I can put more details here.

Stay tuned...

[areplogle]

Understood Alexei.

As far as the legal arena you have two things going for you.

1.) copyright law is international.

2.) Even if it weren't, anyone who's contributed to zabbix and has code in zabbix has the ability to pursue this legally since their contributed code is in violation as well. Meaning if there are any US contributers, they can pursue this is the US district courts with firescope.

Let's see if we can get some help. I'll contact the organizations I know of.

[utropicmedia-karl]

The story has been submitted to slashdot. Please login and vote it up in the Firehose. http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl

title: "Company Sells Open-Source Software As Its Own"




edit: I don't know if they think they can get away with this because you're in Latvia, a small company, or some other reason entirely. This is not right.

[Tenzer]

I have posted this on digg, please digg it in order to increase the publicity:

http://digg.com/software/Open_Source_software_sold_with_violated_GPL_license

[areplogle]

Is there anyway to get the 28 day trial in something like archive.org for prosperity?

[areplogle]

The story has been submitted to slashdot. Please login and vote it up in the Firehose. http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl

title: "Company Sells Open-Source Software As Its Own"




edit: I don't know if they think they can get away with this because you're in Latvia, a small company, or some other reason entirely. This is not right.

I don't see this anywhere on the firehose Anyone else see it? Can you provide a direct link?

[utropicmedia-karl]

I don't see this anywhere on the firehose Anyone else see it? Can you provide a direct link?

Just add "open" in the filter.

[nelsonab]

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=829759

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=826973

If anyone has some moderator points mod up!

[Alexei]

I wrote earlier that FireScope company was our valuable customer.

The company was one of several sponsors of distributed monitoring for 1.4 and the only sponsor of IPv6 development. You probably understand why we are so interested in a peaceful resolution of the GPLv2 issue.

Finally we have some positive news!

Please treat this as an official message from both companies:

It was agreed that ZABBIX and FireScope will work together to resolve any concerns around GPLv2. FireScope expects to have all issues resolved in the next 60 days. The company has been a good partner with ZABBIX and both are working to strengthen the relationship.

I am very happy about this!

[cstackpole]

I am very happy about this!

Congrats! I am glad things worked out!

[szettervall]

Am I the only one who noticed?

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=829759

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=826973

If anyone has some moderator points mod up!

Am I the only one who noticed that the posts to this threads and the Digg thread appear to be from Mark Lynd the President of Firescope?

Both the above mentioned slashdot and digg accounts were setup for the sole purpose of responding to posts defending Firescope as they were recently created and have no other history.

[Tenzer]

Nice spotted, it certainly looks like that's the case. That probably explains his opinions on this matter

[nelsonab]

I just saw this banner add for them on Slashdot. Made me laugh. :-)

Link is to the image, not the clickthrough.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/imgad?id=CL78yIbV97LB6AEQ2AUYTzIINq-YaiegWb4

[lasseoe]

I wrote earlier that FireScope company was our valuable customer.

The company was one of several sponsors of distributed monitoring for 1.4 and the only sponsor of IPv6 development. You probably understand why we are so interested in a peaceful resolution of the GPLv2 issue.

Finally we have some positive news!

Please treat this as an official message from both companies:

It was agreed that ZABBIX and FireScope will work together to resolve any concerns around GPLv2. FireScope expects to have all issues resolved in the next 60 days. The company has been a good partner with ZABBIX and both are working to strengthen the relationship.

I am very happy about this!

How is this going to benefit everyone who have spent countless hours/days/weeks adding patches, contributing bug reports and otherwise supporting the product ?

A lot of these people don't get paid for this, so when a company goes and "steals" the source, rewrites parts of it, rebrands and sells it for a reasonable amount of money, then that's taking the p*ss.

While it's technically a straight cut case, in reality it's far more complex and I realise not much is likely to make it back to the community without taking it to court, what sort of agreement who you made with Firescope?

Thanks.

- Lasse