GPL violation: vieka.com

[John Doe]

Hello Samba Team,

There is a company named "Vieka" (www.vieka.com,
forwards you to a Geocities address at:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/4804/

strangely), that has taken the Sambe sourcebase
and incorporated it into a proprietary product.

The "PE Net" module on their site is a port of Samba
to Windows CE, in order to get Pocket PC devices to
use network shares.  They have built a program
called "PE Net Explorer" around this, and are
marketing and selling it:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/4804/products.htm#penet

Their news page says it is a port of samba:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/4804/index.htm

"PE Net module is heavily modified from samba. It is an excellent piece of 
software and extremely stable. Many thanks to Samba Team for such a 
wonderful work. After a little clean up, source code for PE Net module will 
be available for download on the download page. For those of you who cannot 
wait, please contact Vieka."

However, they are distributing the PE Net Explorer w/o the GPL license and 
there is no link to download any source for the PE Net module, nor the PE 
Net Explorer.

They also have another program called "PE Pocket Explorer" which also uses 
the same Samba-based libraries (which also should be covered under GPL, and 
also violate the GPL in the same ways).

They are selling PE Net Explorer for $25 at:
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=1142

and they are selling PE Pocket Explorer for $35 at:
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=1143&associateid=13


So far they have had 20,000 hits to their Geocities page.
Checking their discussion forum at:

http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&tid=0b111c161d0114110d&sid=0b111c161d0114110d&mid=1&g=1

I see the email address of help at vieka.com referenced.

Unfortunately their domain is registered via Yahoo:

http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=vieka.com


Thanks!


A Samba Fan

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