Parallels soon out of business in Germany due to legal troubles?

Hi,

I just read this (sorry german onyl)

http://www.golem.de/0708/54217.html


In a nutshell it say that the German company NetSys sues German Parallels distributor Avanquest because they say the product violates their copyright.

There's a lot of conovuluted history behind it, but basically the first version of the VM was developed by russian company "MCD Soft" for for NetSys. The MCD company renamed to "Parallels OOO" (2002) an the product named twoOstwo (it was aimed at the banking sector, allowing them to run OS/2 on Windows). Apparently the contract clearly states

"1.2 Der Besteller [die Netsys GmbH] erhält alle Rechte an der entwickelten Software."

Translation

"1.2 The buyer (NetSys GmbH) receives all rights in the developed software"


In 2004 Parallels and NetSys ended their cooperation. After that Parallels made their product available for download, which of course didn't make NetSys very happy (http://web.archive.org/web/20020425004245/http://www.parallels.ru/) For a short while Parallels partnered with "Serenity Systems" developing the product under the name "Serentiy virtual station", but this partnership ended 2005.

The rest is basically common knowledge: Parallels in it's current form (just changing their coperate structure to "Inc") entered the market an became a huge success.

When they entered the German market NetSys took legal action stating that Parallels is based on the original twoOstwo product, which rights are owned by them.

From the technical standpoint there is no doubt that NetSys is right: For example Parallels can open old TwoOsTwo VMs (same virtual disk format) and even the old TwoOsTwo guest tools for mouse synchronization works inside Parallels.

So it really comes down to the legal problem of who ownes what rights in the source. It would be really shame if the great Parallels product will be removed fomr distribution in certain countries due to this problems. Of course I also do not want to use an application, which MIGHT (as we do not know what was really going on; the story above might be totally wrong) be based on stolen source.

I sure hope this gets resolved fast. A gheez and I hope this text won't get censored....



Jisi