Lawsuit: Waze owes 'open-source' programmers $150 million

http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.582575

by yuvadam • 12 years ago

48 15 12 years ago

yuvadam• 12 years ago

[Mirror of the paywalled version: http://pastebin.com/LL8d5u1L]

webhat• 12 years ago

You might be better of pointing to the pastebin or an open site. I was actually going to complain in the comments about the paywall which is why I saw the pastebin.

pervycreeper• 12 years ago

Another article:

http://www.zdnet.com/waze-founder-faces-legal-battle-in-isra...

It is not clear to me if this is a software license violation or just their using crowdsourced data/ something else.

_delirium2• 12 years ago

A bit in the Haaretz article is more explicit:

Gorodish says that when Freemap started, Shabtai, Shinar and Levine gave community members a document saying that the project was owned by the community. Later, when Waze was founded, the three men unilaterally changed the terms of the agreement in what amounts to intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, he says.

Sounds like a dispute over whether there was an understanding in place as to the terms on which people were contributing, and if so what the terms of the agreement were, and/or whether it's legally enforceable.

elsamuko• 12 years ago

Or change the user agent to a search robot.

ig1• 12 years ago

Flagged. Pirating content from behind a pay-wall isn't ok. If you don't want to pay for the content then don't read/upvote it.

(You can of-course write up your own article based upon what you learnt from the underlying article)

muteh2• 12 years ago

Totally agree on the content stealing, but the fact that an article most people can't read got so far up the front page is also worrying.

zhuzhuor• 12 years ago

Maybe more background to add to the story:

Originally, the source code of Waze clients was released under GPL, which AFAIR it was as branded as a part of the community-based map app.

But the company chose to not release the source code after v3.0. This is quoted from one of my emails.

    In reply to your inquiry "Hi, where can we get the latest waze code?":
    
    Thank you for your feedback.
    
    You can find source code for the old versions (up to 2.4) on our wiki - waze.com/wiki
    
    Version 3.0 and higher are no longer under GPL, and at the moment we are still considering if and how we will share the code for these versions.
    
    Best regards,

I guess Waze either 1) has obtained the agreements of all open-source contributors, or 2) has completely rewritten all related source code.

greenyoda2• 12 years ago

They're apparently being sued over the crowdsourced map content, not the code. The article says:

"The claimant in the lawsuit is Roy Gorodish, an Israeli accountant who participated in Freemap Israel, an 'open-source' project to map the country using free software called Roadmap 1. Gorodish, represented by attorney Yitzhak Aviram, says in the lawsuit that Waze's maps were built by daily updates by the community, not solely by Waze programmers. ...

If they violated the GPL on the code, they could face a separate lawsuit from the code's developers.

Lawsuit: Waze owes 'open-source' programmers $150 million

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