Once upon a time, in the Free Software Galaxy there was AbiWord. AbiWord was the first Open Source word processor to have a decent MS-Word import filter, thanks to wv, the GPL licensed library from wvWare.

On some planet, there was a "sailor" who had a proprietary word processor for a proprietary operating system that didn't have the main marketshare, cruising through out the galaxy. That word processor was in need of a real word import filter. Circa 2002 the "sailor" released a version of his new ship, in beta, with a dynamic library wv. Immediately he was notified that using wv this way was a violation of wv copyright because wv is licensed under the GPL and not the LGPL, thus linking against it is considered as a derived work, and should comply with GPL.

The final version of his application got shipped with a separate application whose use was to convert MS-Word documents to RTF (note, it does not convert to their native file format). The source code of the application was released, but not the library source code, which had been modified. The following entry point from wv were renamed:

  1. wvInitParser
  2. wvText
  3. wvOLEFree

I won't take any risk and provide you with the renamed name, but be aware that they are stored.

It was in July 2002, and at that present moment the GPL is somewhat no longer violated. It must be noted that at this stage, Dom, who own the copyright of the code, offered the software vendor to purchase a license of the library with a licensing that was compatible. That offer got rejected.

In Frebruary 2003, a new beta version of the product is release. It now features a MS-Word import feature. So curious that I am, I start cheking, and a strings (1) on the binary reveal this string: wv-0.7.1/oledecod/oledecode.c which is obviously a path name to a source file of wv. That started looking suspicious. So I went further and deeper. It appears that the functions named above are still there, with the renamed name, and disassembling the initialization function of the parser really show the exact same logic as wv. I compared a few more and still the same clues. The assembly is not exactly the same probably because they use CodeWarrior as as compiler but later versions come closer as at one point they switched over to gcc, that I also use for AbiWord. Side by side comparisons show that code, but AbiWord has a few error message dumps in the middle. Last clue: some known buggy documents exhibit the same behaviour in both case (Actually wv has been fixed since).

So far, as of today, September 2005, the latest version of that application still apparently use this camouflaged wv version, and so far they never dared to reply to Dom's cease and desist letters. Far from accusing, evidence show a blatent GPL license violation, and in that case, their ignorance cannot be used as an excuse, They prefer to ignore rather than risking to be found guilty. I'm not giving their name because I don't want to advertise them.

I didn't talk about that publicly but Dom's statement made me do otherwise. Now that he disclose publicly I'm doing it too.