Licensing Dispute - Original Copyright Claim

[lasley]

A recent Twitter conversation has alluded to the fact that Tech Receptives may not have been on the up & up when claiming copyright and licensing rights for Vertical Medical.

No original work has been provided yet, but it has been requested. Action to be taken is unknown at this time.

[pedrobaeza]

And again these kind of things come from the same people... I think you don't need to lose time with this.

GNU Health was later relicensed to GPL when forked from original oemedical. If you see first branch 7.0, license was AGPL-3, as Odoo only allows that license. The switch from AGPL > LGPL was already discussed, so nothing more to deal with.

[lasley]

Pedro - the issue is that Thymbra never approved this & their attribution has been removed. Furthermore, the license to LGPL would not be valid because as I understand it something GPL-3 cannot become LGPL-3 without the author's permission.

I believe there will be two action items here:

• Fix attribution
• License needs to be GPL-3

[pedrobaeza]

@nhomar work on a total remake on this, so I think the attribution doesn't correspond either.

[lasley]

Hmmm yeah looking at this git history, I see very little that is leftover from the olden days and still in use. I think we can just GPL and be done with it.

Will submit PR sometime today

[pedrobaeza]

Well, if you prefer LGPL, I don't see why we should change it.

[lasley]

My preference or not, the code is still derived from the GPL code which would make for the need for compatible licensing?

[lasley]

Although I can say pretty confidently that my team has basically rewritten this entire repo as well.

[pedrobaeza]

That's why i insist: there has been already 2 complete rewritting code activities (one by Vauxoo and another by you), so if you prefer this license, don't take into account trolls' comments.

[lasley]

Good point, Pedro. I'm going to still field the discussion with Thymbra to see what they were thinking. In terms of official communication, all I've gotten from them at this point is the name calling in the Twitter post.

Will leave this open with no action item & report back when I've had a dialog with Thymbra.

[pedrobaeza]

OK, but again, the tweet was not originated by any of Thymbra guys...

[lasley]

This is the author of GNUHealth, which I believe is where the claim is originating from?

[lasley]

It's also what I was referring to when I said name calling - in reference to "thieves"

[pedrobaeza]

I'm keeping the desire of answering that offending tweet that was generated without having more facts, but I'm going to resist, as I can't assure all the facts either, as I'm not an actor that has been involved in this repo, apart from helping you in reviewing/organizing, but one fact is clear: the original code was pure garbage, so they can keep their license on that shitty code for sure.

[lasley]

Yeah I was of a similar mindset and chose to restrain and keep it professional. Kind of a new one for me honestly - it felt weird 😆

Agreed it was incredibly bad. Honestly looking at the GNUHealth stuff, I don't even really see how this was derived or even written by the same person - the structure there is much better & is closer to what we've been moving towards.

[TheCloneMaster]

The really original repo, that was (is?) on Launchpad, was kind of functional. When it was moved to Github, at some point Tech Receptives changed the modular structure and created an enormous monolithic structure, with all files in one module, and most of the code logic lost (as well as original authorship...).

I worked on separating the modules again, and fixing a couple things here and there, and by that time was when Dave began working on the project, with lots of energy and I got stuck in other projects...

As you already said, most has been changed, but not sure how this works on open source, as it was still based on original work from Thymbra, and I think they should remain credited for that... or make sure there is really no original code in the actual repositories, specially for V8...

What I can not understand is why people working on "Open Source" keep fighting others that are helping open source projects... Thymbra abandoned the openerp ecosystem. If people like Dave were not involved, it would be dead a long time ago...

Regards, -Mario

On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 11:38 AM, Dave Lasley notifications@github.com wrote:

Yeah I was of a similar mindset and chose to restrain and keep it professional. Kind of a new one for me honestly - it felt weird 😆

Agreed it was incredibly bad. Honestly looking at the GNUHealth stuff, I don't even really see how this was derived or even written by the same person - the structure there is much better & is closer to what we've been moving towards.

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[lasley]

Mario - they have not explicitly stated what their issue is here, but I believe it is the relicense to LGPL in v10. We would obviously want to provide credit where it is due in the old versions too, assuming attribution was in fact stripped.

Jordi did some digging for us in terms of the history, pasting below:

---

I can see that the original work from Thymbra is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/medical/files/Oldfiles/

The license back then was GPL v3.

The latest version in that repo, 1.0.1, has date 2011-02-16.

Then I can see that Nhomar moved the project to http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~medical-openerp/medical-openerp/6.0/revision/1 on 2011-02-06.

On 2012-11-27 Tech Receptives moved the project to https://launchpad.net/oemedical and classified the project to AGPL, crediting for the original work to Thymbra. http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~oemedical-commiter/oemedical/trunk/revision/2#oemedical/__openerp__.py

---

Looking at the original code, I can almost with certainty say we've completely rewritten all of this. I will be investigating in the next few days exactly what the claim is here and actions for rectification.

Unfortunately Thymbra seems content to keep it on Twitter, so the details are rather slim - outside of the fact that they created GNUHealth.

[lasley]

187 & #188 submitted to remove legacy modules from new branches & update the main project description.

In my capacity as PSC lead for Vertical Medical, I have decided that the safest option for v7 and v8 is to delete them. In this light, I have removed those branches from OCA & have requested that Odoo SA remove them from the Apps store.

The situation is not fully resolved at this time, as a code audit still needs to take place for the existing code. I am fairly confident, however, that the current code is correct in regards to attribution & doesn't maintain a vague resemblance to the code in question.

As mentioned in my pull requests - Thymbra is welcome to claim specific files as well, as any standard copyright/DMCA process would require. I will personally respond and rectify whatever the issue is immediately when identified.

We would prefer these claims be submitted to legal@odoo-community.org, but I will also be watching Github. I do not feel that Twitter is an appropriate avenue to resolve this situation, however.

[nhomar]

@lasley

This is not a derivative work.

This was completly re-done, that's why the Copyright was removed, almost nothing is like Medical, there is not any copyright infringement.

IF there is any copyright fail that you find is because we never deleted the commit history, then if we must say that somebody did something "THAT NEVER MAINTAIN" just because we tried to use their work then we have a problem, because that's almost impossible to follow.

Not just was all re-done, it was redesigned, re-thought and as you know it is almost doing nothing in the very first version we did.

I mean, if we need to give credit in a code, just because we are doing the same area of interest, then we need to put thousands of people we watch their screens to copy some field feature.

You can re-licence that with the licence you want at least you have my permission which is the very first commit done there.

That very first commit was of a project abandoned since 2 years before I copied it, and it was a PoC.

If you make a simple diff between both folders you will see NOTHING is the same. (maybe some field names I do not remember) but if use a field name give copyright, then we are fucked because I need to give credit to all my modules to SAP (which I copied a lot of concepts BTW).

REgards.

[nhomar]

Hello @TheCloneMaster

You have a point:

What I can not understand is why people working on "Open Source" keep
fighting others that are helping open source projects...  Thymbra abandoned
the openerp ecosystem.  If people like Dave were not involved, it would be
dead a long time ago...

This is the main point, Thymbra does not do anything in favor of anybody else than theirselve, even when they were in Openerp Ecosystem they try to fuck everybody else closing code derivative of what they claim was public.

I fight A LOT against those make those kind of attitude, they only want Free marketing that's it.

Any of the work (neither mine of them) even INSTALL WELL on odoo or openerp because neither ME OR THEM maitain that properly, then claim copyright for something YOU ARE NOT WORKING ON, is the same stupid attitude that Oracle have against Goolgle.

Even @lasley if you want remove my Name I am ok! you are working very hard on that (we don't) then even we on Vauxoo are being unjustified included in something that took to us 1 month of work that's it, what you started to work was a work of some few hours on an opendays.

What medical were wen we copied (which again IS NOT what is today) that was a simple set of fields and views that's it, the good work was always saved privately by Thymbra as the major players on Tryton environment, they want just "prominence" and marketing, not build a tool.

Thanks in advance people.

[nhomar]

@lasley

This is the author of GNUHealth, which I believe is where the claim is originating from?

I see the tweet, then do anything for health systems in Odoo will be "Plagiarism", when they patent the "Fact of use Odoo for Hospitals"?

THat's simply STUPID.

[nhomar]

@lasley

Pedro - the issue is that Thymbra never approved this & their attribution has been removed. Furthermore, the license to LGPL would not be valid because as I understand it something GPL-3 cannot become LGPL-3 without the author's permission.

Men, Nobody need approval to re-do something "RE-DO".

I mean, if you want to put a "Thanks to the inspiration of Saint Thymbra" to allow them feel well that's ok (and I think it was for some time in the README BTW).

But you and OCA is the one working on that now with a totally, new code.

[lasley]

@nhomar - I totally get where you're coming from. I also agree that the overarching claims are invalid, and this is likely why they never brought the grandstanding this way.

The thing is though - a lot of this code was basically a 1:1 copy of their code when we picked up the repo. My team rewrote a lot, but there are still some sections that we did not come up with and simply redesigned based on the original. These sections fall under the modified work clause of the GPL.

We luck out though, because we were just in the process of completely redesigning everything so that it better conforms to HL7 FHIR. My solution is to simply delete and completely recreate any code I know my team, or a known good community contributor (like your team or Acsone's team) did not create from scratch.

Regarding some sort of thank you to Thymbra, I am wholly against that due to the fact that their code was literal garbage and they are not being nice or professional about this in any way. If either of the aforementioned points were not true, I would do it.

[JordiBForgeFlow]

We have decided to continue the vertical-medical project in 11.0, and we found that we have refactored all the code to make it more compliant with FHIR and LGPL, so there's no real need to migrate anything from prior versions, including the conflicting modules, medical, medical_insurance.

We propose to start in 11.0 with the following modules that will be 100% refactored - so no need to keep commit history: medical_base medical_insurance

[sisalp]

2017-11-15 12:23 GMT+01:00 Jordi Ballester Alomar notifications@github.com:

We have decided to continue the vertical-medical project in 11.0, and we found that we have refactored all the code to make it more compliant with FHIR and LGPL, so there's no real need to migrate anything from prior versions, including the conflicting modules, medical, medical_insurance.

We propose to start in 11.0 with the following modules that will be 100% refactored - so no need to keep commit history: medical_base medical_insurance

Seems safe enough for users. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say "refactoring" since I'm not sure that refactored code could not be considered as derivated work. I 'd rather say "new development to replace old code" to be sure.

[JordiBForgeFlow]

After some more thought about it we are considering to structure the project according to FHIR:

medical_base: Adds menu, config settings and abstract classes applicable to all FHIR. Potentially from config settings you be capable to install other fhir modules (no need to go to Apps). medical_administration: Adds abstract classes applicable to all Administration modules medical_administration_patient medical_administration_practitioner medical_workflow: Abstracts applicable to all Workflow modules and plan definition. ...

[lasley]

Final action has been taken and a post-incident blog post written https://odoo-community.org/blog/our-blog-1/post/vertical-medical-75

Closing as resolved.