The free community version of Rustdesk Server (a competitor to the Teamviewer remote access software) is AGPL licensed.
https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server
The paid, proprietary Pro version builds on top of the community edition by adding extra features such as user authentication and a web backend for administration.
There exists a repo for the pro server: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk-server-pro
But it only contains install scripts and no actual source code of the application.
The github releases page of this repo however, contains the compiled code of the proprietary pro version and is available for anyone to download for free.
Analyzing the disassembly of the pro and open source binaries shows that the pro version is definitely based on the open source version.
The company previously associated with Rustdesk, Purslane Limited of the UK, is no longer in operation since 2023.
The project has no CLA and so the dozens of previous contributors still hold the copyright to their code and have not given permission for it to be used in a proprietary version.
There have been multiple requests for the source code of this pro version, but either there was no response or the issue was closed without comment.
EDIT: The repo owner has completely deleted the issue, here is a screenshot: https://0x0.st/KaqD.png
To me this just proves they know what they’re doing is wrong.
I wanted to add this discussion post to the mix because I saw this when reading about the related article
it seems that Rustdesk server pro is a parent of the non-pro edition of it, so its not that it uses code from the opensourced project, but that the open sourced project uses the code from the closed source project. Meaning that the licensing restriction of doesn’t apply to that project as it’s actually the original source, and that they made the open sourced project based off that closed source.
If they import contributions to the community edition into the pro edition without license assignment then it’s still a GPL violation