Earlier today I received an email from a reader contending that GUAVA was written with code that was purloined. Rather than let this issue fester, I went to Gizmo5 founder Michael Robertson to help set the record straight.
Robertson, who has been a strong proponent of open source technology since his MP3 era was quick to respond and wanted to set the record straight. Here is Michael's reply:
Andy,Sometimes the open source community over-reacts. My guess is someone went to the about screen and at the top we talk about what you can do with GUAVA since there's no web site or tutorial built for the software. Then they didn't know how to scroll down. If they would have scrolled down they would see lots of additional information about the software. Attached is a screenshot of the About section from GUAVA software running on Android. I think it's obvious it's based on Sipdroid since that's exactly what it says. We did not remove the copyright notice as you can also see. Also, we provide the source code at: http://www.gizmo5.com/guava.tgz and there's links to the source code from the support area. And if anyone had trouble finding it, they could of course send us email and we'd reply.
Anyone who knows my background knows I'm a big believer in open source having spent millions of dollars of my own money and more money from the companies that I've started and run to support open source. Of course people know I did Lindows/Linspire and we built lots of code and paid for other code which went back to the community. A small example is Firefox's 'underline in red when I do a misspelling' - that's code I paid to have written and gave to Mozilla. Way back at MP3.com we gave money to support an unknown open source database called Mysql which went onto bigger things.
Here's the screenshot of the About Page:
Note: You can obtain the latest version of Guava here.
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