I was wondering why I’ve got a crash report from google play version of my app with the message that play store is not installed, which is strange so I decided to to look into it and turns out somebody republished my free app, added ads there and made it paid in Huawei’s AppGallery, they also used the same name, icon and screenshots. My app is licensed under GPLv3, but there was a moment when it was CC BY 4
I assume that’s violation to reuse all resources, although I can’t verify what’s exactly in the app since it’s paid. Has anybody faced similar situation?
Pretty common unfortunately. GPL requires him to display the GPL license and make the full sources available including his changes. There might be more violations. Of course you can complain or maybe better file DMCA notices against the Huawei store in as many places as possible. (Google, Bing …)
Sources only have to be available in a reasonable time once requested.
So you have to ask them first, can’t just assume “no github == violation”.
But yea, they probably are violating it.
Although if they did checkout to the older CC version, that is fair game as long as attribution is noted correctly.
For me it was quite easy, actually: I wrote to thr author about the code. No answer.
I wrote Google about it, they asked me a few things (screenshots, main repo and the like) and they removed the app.
does it mean, i can fork app, change app id, add ads, make repo public with license intact, release on google play store and google is a mere spectator until somebody complains about it?
Google will not try to verify copyright etc until someone complains. Maybe they should get a class action lawsuit to think more about it.
However… what you described above might be perfectly GPL compliant unless someone adds libraries or other code that are not GPL compatible. The way Android libs are bundled it is luckily very hard not to violate GPL when adding common advertising libs