Lawsuit: Waze owes 'open-source' programmers $150 million
haaretz.com
haaretz.com
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,
"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. ...
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."
If they violated the GPL on the code, they could face a separate lawsuit from the code's developers.
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.
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.
This is interesting:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-January/...
(Basically it says that Ehud Shabtai was claiming ownership of the data at that point in time, it doesn't address whatever was said earlier.)
The Wayback Machine has some old versions, this being the earliest, from April 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060409000239/http://www.freema...
(You can of-course write up your own article based upon what you learnt from the underlying article)
If that's the case then seriously, that crap needs to stop. Paste at will.