June 15th, 2009
Green Dam built on copyright, open source violations
The Register reports that China’s Green Dam - Youth Escort software not only rips off Cybersitter software from Solid Oak but also uses open source code without proper attribution.
A poster on SourceForge wrote:
I am posting to reveal the factor that there is a Chinese software develped with OpenCV has bought by inistry of Industry and Information Tech (MII) of China at 41,700,000CNY ( about USD 6,000,000). This software named Green Dam - Youth Escout, develped by Zhenzhou Jinhui Computer System Co. Ltd of China. This ompany deleted the BSD license document which should be included in OpenCV when released it. MII of China bought it on last month for its one-year-using license and require that all the computers sold in China MUST pre-install this software. [sic]
Another poster verifies the use of OpenCV:
From XFImage.xml it can be observed that Green Dam uses OpenCV’s Haar classifier in undergoing human face detection. Included with Green Dam, cximage.dll, CImage.dll, xcore.dll and Xcv.dll, also library files from OpenCV. This all suggests that Green Dam primarily uses OpenCV to process images. However, as is done with much of domestic Chinese software, Green Dam has disregarded OpenCV’s BSD license.
