On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Ludovic SCHURR<[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Madam& Sir,
I am contacting you on behalf of Linagora company, in reference to the
hosting by Google of the Google Code project designated "o-push", accessible
athttp://code.google.com/p/o-push/.
Linagora (http://linagora.com/) is a Open Source Software Publisher and has
been a very strong proponent of Open Source software development in France
since 2000.
O-Push is an important component of Linagora's open source and collaborative
messenging solution OBM (http://obm.org), and this o-push project was
originally created at Linagora's initiative, in order to provide activesync
protocol functionality for this messenging solution.
Mr Thomas Cataldo, appearing as the current owner of the project, as well as
Mr Sylvain Garcia, appearing as a current committer, are both former
employees of Linagora, and it was in the course of the performance of their
employment contracts and for Linagora that they were led to contribute to
the o-push project hosted by Google. In fact, most of the code contributed
to the project was developed internally by these employees of Linagora while
performing their job, and therefore belongs to Linagora under the relevant
applicable law (French Intellectual Property Code Article L113-9 §1 "Unless
otherwise provided by statutory provision or stipulation, the economic
rights in the software and its documentation created by one or more
employees in the execution of their duties or following the instructions
given by their employer shall be the property of the employer and he
exclusively shall be entitled to exercise them."). For example, Adrien
Poupard and Mathieu Baechler, who have contributed to the project (as you
can check in the updates), are currently employees of Linagora, and all code
and contributions committed by them to the o-push project has been provided
during the course of their jobs at Linagora.
Mr Thomas Cataldo resigned from Linagora in October 2010 and, at that time,
did not revert the ownership of the o-push Google Code project to Linagora.
Mr Garcia resigned as well.
Linagora chose not to try and retrieve the Google Code o-push project
immediately, mainly in the hope that the project would continue being
supported by the community and become stronger by itself, as a major open
source component of Active Sync functionality, focusing common efforts by
contributors outside of Linagora. However, the project development on Google
Code has been at at a standstill since December 10th, 2010, i.e. for more
than a full year. In effect, almost all code committed to the Google Code
o-push project has been developed internally at Linagora and belongs to this
company.
In this context, Linagora wishes to retrieve official ownership of the
o-push project and actively resume development of that code, notably in the
aim of encouraging the development of o-push contributions, and in the hopes
of supporting an active open source software ecosystem around o-push.
However, it has come to our attention that Mr Thomas Cataldo has recently
joined a direct competitor of Linagora and there is therefore a strong
probability that a direct request to him would be met with a refusal and a
purely expedient reprise of the project activity in order to deprive
Linagora of the use of the o-push project, of the exploitation of its own
contributed code, and of the opportunity to bring a fresh, dynamic impulse
to the project.
Upon thorough examination of the 8 criteria provided in your FAQ
(http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/FAQ) for the retrieval of a google
code project, several of these criteria seem to be met in the current
situation :
1 - The o-push project has lain fallow for more than a full year ;
2 - Mr Cataldo seems to be squatting over the project in a context of unfair
competition practices by a Linagora competitor in the employ of which he
currently is ;
3 - Most if not all code in the o-push project has been developed and is
owned by Linagora, and Linagora wishes to continue development of that code
at the Google Code o-push project page ;
4 - o-push is a registered trademark belonging to Linagora for the territory
of France (under n°under n° 3894603), which you can double-check by looking
up O-PUSH in the french registered trademarks database
(http://bases-marques.inpi.fr/).
Please contact Mr Cataldo first about transferring/sharing ownership.
Additionally, you can note that there are quite a number of references to
Linagora OBM solution in the updates and commits to the project. OBM is
referenced in the updates dated Apr 02, Apr 19, Apr 27, Sep 8, Sep 23, Oct
21, Dec 10, 2010.
These are the grounds upon which Linagora respectfully bases a formal
request to Google aiming at benefitting from a transfer of ownership of the
o-push projecthttp://code.google.com/p/o-push/ from Mr Thomas Cataldo to
our o-push technical team leader at Linagora, Mr Michel-Marie Maudet
([email protected]).
I would be grateful for your feedback at the earliest convenient time.
Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any further
information.
Sincerely,
--
Ludovic SCHURR
Chief Legal Officer / Directeur Juridique
------------------
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