Dear Charles Manning,
In message CAE21AQpUuFOAfwRk=7rsQHL5p_EVhiNQUAT4QKY=px0SvxOb7A@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
- If you buy a product containing GPL code, but the company does not
supply the code, then - in general - you cannot force the company to supply you with code. You need to get the collaboration of an infringed copyright holder to force the issue.
Just for the record: I'm always willing to help out as such.
One of the problems with pursuing these actions is that it can be somewhat hard to prove that you have contributed materially to claim copyright over some code.
I think I should be in a pretty good position to prove that. This is why I always offer help in such situations.
In much of open source though, there have been many major contributors and even more minor contributors and it can be hard to claim to be a legitimate copyright holder. In theory, I guess you could claim copyright on a three line patch, but the harsh reality of lawyer land would probably want to see something far more substantial.
This is one of the reasons why the FSF asks for / recommends copyright assignments, see for example [1].
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk