Thank you @Naomi_SexyCyborg_Wu for helping in the Creality Marlin release.
What did she do?
It sounds like she was liason, translator and such to get the company to release the code and send a printer to the Marlin developers. They evidently did not know they were doing anything wrong over at Creality. She may have saved Creality money in the process too. Hopefully that sums it up accurately enough.
So they finally released the CR-10S firmware?
So she saved them from a lawsuit?
Can they even raise a lawsuit over it? Nobody was loosing money. It was just a jerk move on their end but one they had no knowledge of
Lawsuit…no…people boycotting them for an unintentional GPL violation, yes.
Want more details? Look it up. I just got a general idea of the situation.
On second thought…here…
Amazing to me that it’s Creality getting reamed by the community and not one of the long-standing bad actor leeches like Geeetech or Makerbase or CTC. All the “old hands” have been bitching furiously about GPL violations since… like… 2012? And now it goes critical mass all of a sudden? WTH?
@Cristian_Martinez Lawsuit would be for the fair price of a PAID license for the software… times a hundred thousand printers or whatever Creality has sold now. (They claim 60,000/yr capacity.) Even if you give your code away for free under GPL, that open source distribution is a very specific and limited copyright license grant, and anybody who doesn’t obey the GPL terms doesn’t have permission to use the copyrighted code. Meanwhile you can still sell that same code you wrote under any other terms if you want. So when someone uses your GPL code without obeying the GPL license, they’re actually stealing a paid non-GPL license from you. That’s where lawsuit damages would come into play.
The impossible part here is figuring out who actually has standing to sue. Meaning, who owns what copyright(s) within a large codebase that has been developed under GPL by a hundred people over many years? Each individual person only owns the code they wrote from scratch. And you don’t own any of the code you didn’t write, you’re just using it under somebody else’s GPL license. And… your own code contribution may have no license value without the rest of the GPL code included… so what lost license fee damages can you actually claim?
Basically it is only clear-cut that you can sue for copyright infringement in GPL cases where one person clearly wrote all or a large portion of the code, and that code has some independent value on its own (like an SD card library or whatever). Then that person could say “you’re using my code without obeying the license, so you’re infringing my copyright, and you owe me license fees as damages.”
Who has that kind of copyright ownership standing with Marlin? I doubt any one person does at this point. It would be a stronger copyright infringement case if it were RepRapFirmware or Smoothieware or Sailfish, where the majority of the code was written by a couple clearly-identifiable people.
@Ryan_Carlyle As far as I understand, suing a company in China is hopeless. They do not have remotely the same laws.
@Preston_Bannister The laws are fine — they have all the necessary international agreements to respect foreign copyrights and so forth. More like “too expensive to be worth the effort, too hard to collect on a judgment, and too sensitive to the whims of courts that aren’t very interested in helping foreigners.” Big US corporations struggle to enforce IP laws in China; it’s hopeless for a pack of hobbyists.
@Ryan_Carlyle
Creality even didn’t developed the software modifications by them self. They hired an external company to deliver a firmware for their hardware.
Fun fact, they had to pay for open source software.
Now they understood was all this open source thing means and that their firmware is a part of it. So it seems they stopped the contract with the external company and send printers to the marlin developers. Of course with the hope that they will help. But also as some kind of excuse I guess.