Microsoft pulls download tool over GPL violation accusation

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 03:54

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft has taken offline an utility it supplies to help download DVD and USB images of Windows 7 purchased online, while it investigates allegations that GPL-ed code was used to develop the tool.
Allegations of stealing code that was under the GNU General Public Picence for inclusion in the utility were made by a software developer, Rafael Rivera , last week.

Rivera wrote that while poking through the UDF-related internals of the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, he had found code that appeared to be "obviously lifted" from the ImageMaster project that is licensed under the GNU GPL.

While code from GPL projects can be re-used by others, re-distribution of the combined entity can only be done under the GPL.

Rivera pointed out that Microsoft had released the download tool under a licence other than the GPL.

I wrote to Microsoft, asking how I could obtain code for this tool so that a complete comparison could be done.

This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson responded: "We are currently looking into this issue and are taking down the WUDT tool from the Microsoft Store site until our investigations are complete.

"We had hired a third party to help create the WUDT tool and as our investigation is still ongoing, it's too soon to talk about next steps until our investigation is concluded. We apologize (sic) to our customers for any inconvenience."

Asked for his opinion about Rivera's claim, and whether this conmingling of code could have happened by accident, Harald Welte, who runs the GPL Violations project, said: "I cannot verify or deny such a claim without detailed technical analysis - something that requires quite some amount of time and we have a _long_ backlog of cases.

The GPL Violations project creates awareness about past and present infringing use(r)s of GPL-licensed software.

Welte added: "Also, as I do not hold any copyright on ImageMaster, I would not be able to do any enforcement anyway.

"Regarding your (query) 'could it have happened by accident': Legally, this does not matter. Whether or not you violate copyright on purpose or on accident: It is a civil and criminal offence. The copyright holder has the right to ask for cease+desist from the infringing entity."

Senior FOSS developer Russell Coker said the code samples seemed "suspiciously similar."

"The comments note that for certain trivial cases there are few ways of solving a problem, but in this case it seems very similar. Also the comments note that there could be a possibility of the code being accidentally labelled as GPL. While that seems unlikely it is something I can't rule out with the information available to me.

"Usually when talking about ~30 lines of code from a moderate-sized program it's not such a big deal. Maybe some MS employee was reviewing the source to other programs for ideas (which is quite OK) and then mistakenly copied some code. Sure the code has to be replaced, but it seems most likely to be an honest mistake by a junior employee. If MS was to take a reasonable and cooperative approach to mistakes by others then we could give them the same courtesy.

"I think that the real issue here is the difficulty in getting these things right. You have to consider that difficulty in light of the hard line that MS takes against people and companies that get some technicality wrong. The guitar string company "Ernie Ball" made a small honest mistake and were treated extremely harshly by MS.

"I wouldn't take a hard line on a small accidental infringement of my copyright because given the amount of coding that I've done there is a reasonable chance that I have mistakenly infringed someone's copyright."