On 3 Oct 2002 at 9:02, Alexander V.Nevsky wrote:

> Bill, can't say I like it from common human point of view, even
> more, I was very disappointed by fact of cloning of Firebird, but IPL
> is'nt violated. As far as I can understand, this agreement was
> constructed by Borland for their own purposes when they experimented
> with OS IB - collect contributions and sell product. Someone should
> make publicly available changes for code, but shouldn't newly created
> modules even if they have the same functionality. Can of worms, as all
> created by lawyers ;)

Do you mean that Yaffil team rewrote Firebird/InterBase from scratch ?
Just changing old files to new ones is not enough, take a look at
Firebird 2 sources and read the IPL. Even *copying* a line from old
source file will infect the whole new file, and copying is not just
copy&paste, but also when you write the same lines by hand! I believe
that they may wrote some new files with new code, so they can leave these
files for themselves, but I doubt that they wrote *new* code for
everything.

So I would demand to know how sources are available. Well, they can sell
binaries and provide sources only to those whom they sell those binaries
(but these "customers" are free to modify and distribute sources to
anyone), but sources must show somewhere. Actually, I can barely tolerate
that they made Yaffil 1.0 up to RC3 available for public download without
sources. It's clear infringement of IPL.

If you (or anyone else here) have any contact to Yaffil team, can you
inform them please, that I (and probably others) would take an open
action against them, if they will violate IPL ? They are ridding the edge
for some time, and it starts to be too much. Do you know that they
already got all FB 1.5 changes to Yaffil ? They gave back nothing, want
to get money from Yaffil, very likely violate IPL and didn't gave credit
to Firebird team for all the work they get for free, and blaze about how
they are better than Firebird. Really, it starts to be too much.

Best regards
Pavel Cisar
http://www.ibphoenix.com
For all your upto date Firebird and
InterBase information