On Fri, Jun 30, 2023 at 01:41:18PM +0000, Leslie Satenstein via devel wrote:
What should I do, if the person I gave the software to, removes my
copyright, rebrands the software and sells my software as their own?
Is it right? And when I release a bug fix, they take it, insert the
fix into the rebranded copy they are selling, and they quietly say,
"Screw You, Leslie".
In some jurstictions (eg the US) removing your copyright identification
is infringement all on its own, and you can go after them for statutory
damages. (See 17 USC 1202 (b) and (c), and 17 USC 1203 (c) (2))
But that's not what has happened here. Nobody is claiming that they are
selling RHEL, and nobody has stripped away RH's copyrights. Now the RH
*trademarks* are another matter, but RH themselves did that stripping,
with what they uploaded to CentOS Stream (and CentOS before that).
What right does a company have the right to clone and rebrand my
product and resell it? Under the gpl3, they have an unenforceable
obligation to provide me with bug reports. They do not have a moral
right to redistribute my software as their own, and for remuneration.
Under the GPLv3, there is no "obligation" to provide you, as the author,
with anything, bug reports or otherwise. Their only obligations are to
ensure that everyone they send binaries to also receives the complete
corresponding source code to those binaries, all under the terms of the
GPLv3.
- Solomon
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