AfterDawn: News

According to various sources, Sigma Designs is still violating the GPL license in their products. Despite releasing the source code yesterday after they got busted red-handed, they haven't announced anywhere that their codec code is based on XviD development team's work -- and in GPL rules, all contributors have to be awarded in copyrights correctly.

So, basically Sigma was forced to release their code, after they stole it and used it for many months without any mentioning of GPL anywhere, but they still try to turn their partial compliance with GPL into a PR stunt. This violates also American copyright laws, as well as GPL license. Now general public gets the picture that they've developed the free MPEG-4 codec by themselves, which is not true, getting all the good press and praise from the end-users.



Also, DivXNetworks has announced that they will support XviD fully in this matter. It also seems to be that Sigma has included some parts of original OpenDivX code into their codec as well -- once again, without any mention in their copyrights about this.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 24 Aug 2002 6:38