Interview with PxLinux developer Zeb

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Recently, the developers of the PxScan, PxView, and PxLinux utilities received cease and desist letters sent by a lawyer company in Brussels representing Shinano Kenshi, the Japanese company which controls the Plextor brand and develops Plextools (R) for Windows.

Wikinerds Portal has covered this story before, and Nikolaos S. Karastathis (NSK) had interviewed Mr. Alexander Noé, developer of the PxScan/PxView utilities. Now the other developer (of PxLinux), Zeb, granted us an interview as well.

Zeb has developed PxLinux, a port of PxScan/PxView to the GNU/Linux operating system. PxScan and PxView were developed by Alexander Noé and run on Windows.

Zeb lives in the United Kingdom and, just like Noé, he received the letter in an email, not in actual paper.

[edit] The interview

The interview was completed by email. The whole text is released under a "verbatim copying" licence, so we encourage you to re-publish it if you wish (see the full licence at the end).

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Hello, please introduce yourself and briefly describe the software you developed.

Zeb: Hi, I'm Zeb, I am living in UK and programming is one of my hobbies during my spare time. I am particularly interested in Free software development. Overall, the Free software movement gave a breath of fresh air in the computing area, at the amateur and professional levels. I bought a PX-716A DVD writer a couple of months ago. Not only Plextor had a very good reputation (that I checked by myself, I had several Plextor CD writers in the past), but I was also interested in the special feature of the drive, called Q-check, allowing to do media quality scans before and after burning. However, the software suite (PlexTools(r)) bundled with the drive was only compatible with Windows. As I am a Linux user, I wanted to develop a software to be able to perform these Q-checks, and possibly share this with other Linux users. After all, Linux users who bought a Plextor DVD burner buyers payed exactly the same price than Windows users, and would like to enjoy their burner as much as Windows users do. Moreover, these features are an incentive to chose Plextor over their competitors. After I discovered Alexander's work on the Internet, I contacted him. Straight away he shared his code with me. What interested me were the SCSI commands to trigger the various QChecks. The interface of the burner is entirely standard, and the specifications are published (MMC-3 SCSI compliant). It took me a couple of hours to do a first, quick and dirty, version of PxScan for Linux (also called PxLinux). I did not even have to write the C++ functions to access the drive, since the drive has a standard interface. These functions were of course available as part of any Free burning software. Moreover, the response of the drive is plain and clear, and need just to be displayed as histograms (for this I used Gnuplot). Finally, in order to make the code legally distributable, Alexander offered the code under the GPL license. Thus I deposited the code on Sourceforge (where the project has been temporarily removed).

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: You received a letter via email about these utilities. Who sent the letter and what did it say?

Zeb: I received an email with an attached PDF document. The letter was sent by a european lawyer company hired by Shinano Kenshi, Plextor's parent company. In this letter they claimed Alexander and me were violating their copyrights, their rights in relation with "protected interfaces", and that we "committed unfair commercial practices". They also sent letters to various websites, saying we were using their forums to promote our "illegal" software...

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Have you contacted a professional lawyer yet? Did you receive any legal advice?

Zeb: Yes. We have the same legal advice. [Ed: See also the interview with Alexander Noé].

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Have you replied to this letter?

Zeb: No. Not yet, we seek legal advice before doing official statements.

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Why do you think the lawyers sent this letter, and what are their requests?

Zeb: They have asked to drop PxScan and PxLinux, to remove them and stop talking about them. Their motivations are not known yet, since we had no contact with Plextor anyhow. Of course, since Plextor is now trying to sell a version of their PlexTools software, some people suggest they could see PxScan as a competitor. However, Plextor does not make any Linux version of PlexTools. I don't ask them to support Linux, this is their choice (bad in my opinion), but at least to respect the freedom of their consumers to use their hardware as they intend. Plextools, PxScan and PxLinux can perfectly and legally coexist. Lots of proprietary and Free software do exactly the same task, take Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or Gimp. Also, that would be good to have a conversation with people at Plextor, so that they could clarify the position of the company about Free software and third-party work. I was not expecting such a reaction from a company that declared recently about their new video capture device, ConvertX : "Plextor is strongly committed to supporting the Open Source Software movement with free development tools that help speed the creation of next-generation Linux-based video software," said Dirk Peters, director of marketing, Plextor. "The release of this SDK was a direct response to requests from the user community for an easier way to work with Plextor ConvertX video capture devices on computers running Linux." So is their support to Free software community just a PR exercise ?

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Is the letter confidential, can you post it for everyone to see?

Zeb: Same answer with Alexander's. [Ed: See also the interview with Alexander Noé].

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: In the last years there are increasingly more legal problems for free/libre/open-source software projects. Now software patents may be introduced in Europe. What are your views on this issue?

Zeb: Software is the expression of ideas, and ideas should not be patentable. Patents are today a big threat for the innovation. During the 19th century, patents were used to protect small inventors against the industry giants. Now the situation has been reversed: big companies can easily threaten small businesses and inventors with bogus patents that have been accepted without any serious review of their validity or their originality. On the other hand, the "copyright" legal frame - the other form of intellectual protection - is suitable for software. Contrary to patents, copyright protects not the ideas, but their expression: the source code. You can protect your own work, you can also relax the terms of that protection (which is the case with Free licenses), but cannot prevent others to make a similar work, even based on similar ideas. What if one author had been able to patent the "cartoon" genre, would Disney and Tex Avery not been able to create their own cartoons ? Do you want a world with Photoshop as the only image manipulation software, or Word, as the only text-processing software ? Last but not least, 20 year-long patents are simply ludicrous at the computing level. In 20 years, we went from the Sinclair ZX81 to 4GHz dual core processors. I really hope that the European Parliament will be able to stand against the patents, especially at a moment when US companies, including Microsoft, urge to review the conditions for software to be patented. Michel Rocard, the rapporteur of the European Parliament on the software patent directive has made good propositions to prevent that pure software ideas may be patented. I hope he will be listen to by the Commission. Note that our legal problem with Plextor does not concern patents anyway. The communication interface with Plextor burners is standard, and standards cannot be protected.

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: What do you plan to do now?

Zeb: Wait and see...

Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Anything more you want to say?

Zeb: I wish that Plextor's people could contact us and have some discussion, instead of treating their (ex-) good customers with legal threats. Therefore they have to clarify their position and say if really they support the Open Source Software movement.

The text of this article is Copyright (C) 2005 by Zeb and Nikolaos S. Karastathis. Verbatim copying and redistribution of the entire text of this article are permitted provided this notice is preserved and a reference to its original location is provided: http://portal.wikinerds.org/interview-zeb-2005jun