Important: the subject matter and parties involved with this legal issue are deliberately not mentioned here; if you are aware of their identities, I ask you not to mention them publicly here in comments, or anywhere else.
As some of you are already aware, over the last few months there has been an ongoing legal issue with a 3rd party having allegedly used OGRE code without respecting the license conditions. I hate getting involved in legal disputes, there are so many more useful things to do with time, money, and emotional energy, but nevertheless as custodian of OGRE it falls to me and my company to take charge of situations like this, however reluctantly.
Happily, the issue was finally resolved today. Details are confidential (so don’t ask), but what I can say is that a satisfactory resolution was achieved, and without me having to remortgage to fund the legal bill. The Free Software Foundation Europe were very instrumental in advising me on the case, and directing me towards good legal representation, so I really can’t thank them enough for their help; but I hope that the donation I’ll be making will go some way to repaying my debt to them.
On the whole though, I’m just glad it’s all out of the way, it’s one less distraction 
February 11th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Yesssssssss !!!!
There are only 2 things that “bother” me :
1) will it “repell” them from using open-source code again (this time in a lawfull way) ?
2) since there is no “publish acknowledgement”, it won’t deter other people from using open-source code without beeing complianty with the license
February 11th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
1) That’s up to them – our licensing conditions are far from unreasonable, and many commercial products get built adhering quite easily to them; the problem here was not the open source license, but alleged inappropriate code usage – something that can happen regardless of license type, it’s just that code is more widely available in the open source arena. I personally think the only effect will be that a company that is *already* against using open source code would be extra careful in enforcing that policy with their staff – which is essentially no change from an open source perspective. Those who were already accepting of open source can and will continue to use it legally and won’t be put off, because it’s really not hard to comply with an open source license if you’re already accepting of it.
2) The details do not need to be public for that to be effective. It doesn’t matter specifically who did what, all that matters is that we publicise our licensing conditions clearly so that people can make up their own minds, and that action may be taken if those licenses are not respected.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Glad that this is resolved now.
Does the resolution also encompass the other parties involved?
February 11th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
That’s great news Steve. I’m curious how the violation came to your attention. Did the party in question publicly flat out said “We are doing X/Y/Z with the code”, or did you find out with other means? If that is part of the private details, then no worries.
The important thing is that you got sweet justice, and it (hopefully) didn’t cost you an arm and a leg.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
@haffax: yes, the other parties delegated the responsibility for pursuing it to me (this is now encoded into all contributor licenses for the future, in this instance we had to specifically organise it). I don’t blame them, I’d have liked to give it to someone else to sort out
@leed: the issue was picked up by someone in our community originally. One of the advantages of having thousands of people across the world familiar with your code!
February 11th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
It’s good to know that the free software foundation europe had your back
February 12th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Glad to hear that worked out. Thanks for the update. I saw the thread where the situation was brought to your attention and I have wondered time to time since then how it turned out.
I do think it’s a shame that the details of your arrangment are private. Ideally, in a public project, it seems like that sort of thing should be transparent. But I understand that privacy is a common issue in that kind of situation and was probably a term of your arrangement.
At any rate I think the way this was handled might help assure other people who might be on the fence about Ogre or open source.
February 12th, 2009 at 5:43 am
I am glad there is at least good news for you because I have been reading you suffer quite a lot from you back and of course the crackers problem. And of course, as a community member I feel good for myself too
February 12th, 2009 at 10:11 am
@johnhp: I know what you mean. However, in these circumstances when it’s all detected a bit too late to correct properly, there are practical considerations that mean compromise is required. I was glad that the FSF were very open about this sometimes being the case, and that they fully appreciated that pushing for a ‘perfect’ solution in all cases is impractical. Sometimes pushing for the perfect outcome can do too much damage to all parties, and in fact aiming for a reasonable middle ground is the best option for all concerned.
In this case, I hope the outcome is that our open source license is reinforced – that it’s perfectly commercially friendly, but that there are genuine conditions attached that should be respected. I also hope that it’s made clear that open source advocates are not reactionary fanatics, and that we are open to reasonable talks when mistakes are allegedly made. At the end of the day, we don’t want to try to ruin anyone’s reputations or make things hard for them, like some rabid witch-hunt when wrongdoing is alleged; we’re reasonable people who just want our license conditions to be respected.
February 12th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Well said. Congratulations on the positive outcome.