From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 10:27:17 EDT
Hello Mike, Peter, Mostafah, Abi folks,
First off, I want to say that we mean you no will ill. We're just trying
to protect our own best interests at the moment.
In the past, we've contacted the OEone company with regard to their GPL
compliance (i.e. releasing the AbiWord GPL source codes along with their
Homebase product). After much ado and hassles, we finally recieved an
outdated 0.7.14 source rpm from OEone. Later, a 0.9.6 source rpm was
made available to us.
The sticking point here is that your RPMs were idential to the ones that
we distribute ourselves in all but the most trivial of ways. This means
that your XPCOM plugin-connector bridge to integrate Abi into the
Homebase environment was never included in your source RPMs. Seeing as
how this is the code we were primarly interested in seeing, you might
understand our disguist.
It has been roughly 10 months since your initial contact with me when
you posted screenshots of Abi inside mozilla. 10 months is more than
enough time for us to get back the relevant source code, as per terms of
the GPL.
I direct your attention to http://abiword.sourceforge.net/oeone.html
which will be made public in roughly 5 hours (3PM US EST, May 7, 2002)
to such entities as Slashdot, LinuxJournal, LinuxToday, Gnotices,
MozillaZine, et. al. if our requests are not addressed to my
satisfaction. If my requests in the document are not met to my
satisfaction within 2 days (Thursday, 6PM US EST), OEone will face
litigation in what may be one of the first court trial tests of the GPL.
As I'm sure that your company wishes to avoid both these scenarios, I
advise you to comply with my reasonable requests and avoid a potentially
crippling blow to your company. If OEone plays nicely with us, the web
page goes away for all of eternity. If not, you can imagine the
reprocussions.
I know that you guys are just developers, and I don't take any offense
toward you, but I and a lot of my colleagues are tired of being led
around by the nose by your company. Please forward this to Eid EID and
whomever else needs to see it. I apologize for being a royal pain in the
ass, but in this case it is both my right and my obligation to be one.
If you wish to discuss this matter further, please contact me via email
or irc.gnome.org#abiword. The clock is ticking.
Dom
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