

Lawsuit: Waze owes 'open-source' programmers $150 million - yuvadam
http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.582575

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zhuzhuor
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.

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greenyoda
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. ...

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.

------
yuvadam
[Mirror of the paywalled version:
[http://pastebin.com/LL8d5u1L](http://pastebin.com/LL8d5u1L)]

~~~
ig1
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)

~~~
muteh
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.

~~~
stingraycharles
Shouldnt the conclusion then be that apparently enough people can read it to
make it worth a HN frontpage listing?

~~~
muteh
It looks like you got downvoted a bit for saying this, sorry. You're totally
right. If enough people /can/ see it that it can get to the front page then
fair enough. I was feeling a little more cynical earlier, assuming that the
voters hadn't read it.

