Last month Justice Muir in the High Court of New Zealand ruled in favour of Otoy in the copyright infringement case Otoy vs Andrey Kozlov. Andrey Kozlov, a former employee at Otoy and the developer of FStormRender, was accused of using IP from Octane to develop his software. The court has ordered that Otoy be awarded $50,000 in exemplary damages and granted permanent injunctions preventing the sale, download or supply of infringing versions of FStormRender. You can find the full ruling documents on the Ministry of Justice website and read a reaction, including a presentation of Otoy’s evidence, from the founder of Otoy Jules Urbach on Medium.
Update. Andrey Kozlov has responded to the evidence presented in Jules Urbach’s Medium post via the FStorm Facebook group.
He claims that the source code was provided for the Russian lawsuit, not the recent ruling, and that sharing it’s contents it illegal under Russian law; explains the reason for the code similarities is due to the use of the same open source libraries and the appearance of the words Octane in the source code as because FStorm contains an Octane to FStorm scene converter. You can read his reaction in full on Facebook.
The lawsuit is continuing in the Russian Courts.
Funnily enough mr. Urbach’s main argument seems to be about the QMC sampler. He (conveniently?) seems to left out that the code is actual opensource and they used it too. QMC Code is said to originate from : http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~fkuo/sobol/
The name references showing up in SUO files of the code is not abnormal (but not very smart either), it can easily be the history of the files opened in visual studio. I’ve seen this myself too. I’m not qualified to give a final judgement, because somethings are weird to me too, but maybe all is not what it appears to be, a more knowledgeable person should pass judgement. To me it seems Kozlov was at least sloppy and Urback seems vengeful. I don’t use either renderer.
Can you point to some source on the web that contains the code?
I tried searching for
“for (unsigned int d=1; d<QMCSAMPLESIZE; d++)"
and came up completely empty.
Urbach pointed out how the two source codes were identical up to formatting and variable names – while this could result from using the same open source code, I wonder how open that code is if no search engine can find it?
Hey M, please read the new facebook post and all it’s comments. I’m not saying it answers all questions in full satisfaction, but it makes things more clear, at least to me. And let’s not forget, what proof do we have that mr. Urbach had not just changed it’s code to make it match to Fstorm. Why should we trust his story? In the end we don’t know and a judge will have to pass judgement on all matters. I have some programming experience and while I’m not fully satisfied yet, I do think Otoy’s case is very weak. So much code and all he can find are these bits of code, if there was more then it would have been posted or at least mentioned for sure. Not it just points to filenames in generic visual studio file. I’ve seen that in my projects too, it’s just file histpry names. The only issue for me is the formatting style, but for very generic code it’s possible to match it. But we’ll see, I guess.
This is starting to sound like a good script for “Pirates of GPU Valley”. Rendered in Redshift of course 😉
Otoy\Refractive sure has had some interesting relationships with developers like Christopher Moore, Brecht Van Lommel and now Andrey Kozlov.
C’mon, mr. Urbach just need to justify uniqueness of his business (no one except them can not write physicaly based renderer), for private investors.
some more info can be found here. It does look pretty bad for Kozlov
https://medium.com/@julesurbach/otoy-vs-kozlov-c49b803105ac
https://fstormrender.ru/forum/forum/off-topic/1703-andrey-kozlov-vs-otoy?p=10710#post10710
I love spy stories whit codes and KGB!
you should look at this. a long but very interesting read from an octane ex-developer. i think you won’t regret reading some of it.
http://christopheremoore.net/otoy/
gezzz, that’s creepy as hell… I know that there are always 2 sides to the same story, but this doesn’t look very good for Otoy
So gridy.
Once again the employee looses.
Wow, remind me never to work for OTOY.
OTOY… the BFF of Autodesk… they work closely… they sure learn from each other…