Eran Strod
Director of Product Marketing
estrod@blackducksoftware.com

Tim YeatonEdu4 is a company based in Nantes, France that markets distance learning tools and multimedia equipment for education. Until a recent lawsuit, they were known primarily only in France.

From their website: they were founded in 1987 and in the past 20 years have grown to have 70 employees. They are ISO 9001 certified which, if you are familiar, requires an incredible amount of hard work and discipline. Unfortunately, that certification is being overshadowed by their failure to comply with the obligations of the GPL license and then fighting it all the way to the Paris Court of Appeals.

The Court’s ruling is available on the web (in French) at http://fsffrance.org/news/arret-ca-paris-16.09.2009.pdf

Two weeks ago if you googled Edu4, you probably would have seen all kinds of links to articles about their various activities and accomplishments. Now, you see prominent articles about their GPL violation and their lost court appeal. Edu4’s brand has been severely tarnished.

One of the unique aspects of this case is that an end-user of open source (not just the holder of the copyright) sued violators of the GPL and won. This clears the way for other French users of open source to take legal action when they see a license violation. The preamble to the GPL license (versions 2 and 3) explicitly states that if you distribute (or sell) copies of a GPL program, you are required to give recipients source code and the rights to copy, distribute and modify the code.

During the litigation process it was discovered that Edu4 had removed copyright and license notices in the software. It’s amazing how many times I’ve talked to developers who naively believe that removing these notices either eliminates the obligations, or that it will not be discovered. This rather public example should help debunk those myths.

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