The company has denied the allegations, claiming that the code was included in testing versions only—and has accused its attackers of acquiring the source code to its products illegally.

In a posting on DrunkenBlog, Michael Bell—who writes for the site under the nom de plume "Drunkenbatman"—claimed that parts of Maui X-Stream Inc.'s flagship product, a video suite called VX30, contained code derived from a variety of open-source projects.

He said these open-source projects include XviD, a cross-platform MPEG4-compliant codec; Media Player Classic; MP3 encoder LAME; and several others. VX30 is playerless video streaming solution that has been used by companies including City Cosmetics, Africast TV and GEICO.

In the posting, Bell shows strings of code, which he claims existed in versions of the VX30 products from 2004 and 2005, including copyright notices and variable names indicating that the product was derived from open-source code.

Bell also posted detailed instructions allowing users to analyze versions of the product themselves in order to look for code derived from open source, along with links to versions of VX30 that allegedly contain the stolen code.

Bell also said Maui X-Stream had begun to "pack" the VX30 applications—a process that essentially encrypts the code on disk, decrypting it only when the application is launched into memory—which had made it more difficult to find the alleged open-source code.

In response, Jim Kartes, president of Maui X-Stream, told eWEEK.com that the company could find no open-source code in its current shipping product, although he acknowledged that some code had been included for testing purposes.

"Every code they mention was for one purpose only: testing," he said. "We tested XviD for the mp4 codec decoding and encoding use, so we could support that codec on our encoder, in case a customer had a source video in that codec format. XviD does not exist in our software anymore; all the testing source was removed a long time ago."

Furthermore, Kartes said LAME code had been used "for testing mp3 streaming—but never was active. We use OGG for our audio streaming and claim that in our documentation and FAQ."

Kartes added that although the company had used the look and feel of Media Player Classic for part of its product, the Media Player Classic does not have the "rights on Microsoft's look and feel."

A report from the Maui X-Stream's engineers forwarded to eWEEK.com claimed that "all the testing code was removed two months ago, [and] so that's why when people are downloading our software trying to find any evidence, they go back to decompiling the 2004 version, because they can't find any possible strings in our existing software."

Kartes said his company is "having a hard time tracking down those people that claim to have tested our source code. We do have a concern here because they would have had to obtain our source code illegally to do so. We know the one person mentioned in the DrunkenBlog story has done so for sure because he admits and brags that he has hacked our source code and is even posting our encoder on his Web site."

But Bell claimed that the code had not been obtained illegally. "We were very clear on how and where the evidence was found, and how to duplicate the findings, so I find the statement a little bizarre," he said. "The evidence wasn't found via 'source code.' It was found within their actual shipping product going back to 2004, which they had publicly available on their Web site as a trial download."

Kartes went on to attack the company's critics. "Doesn't this all boil down to open-source people thinking they have the right to break laws by violating patent rights, but when developers use legal code, open-source people think they have the right to make their own laws. I've never quite understood this concept of open source and exactly where it came from," he said.

Bell, meanwhile, said, "I think we've been down this road before with Mr. Kartes with CherryOS, and his various claims surrounding that party. I'm entirely confident of the evidence found within their products, and of the legal solidity of the GPL [GNU General Public License] and other open-source licenses."

CherryOS attracted a hailstorm of criticism when Maui X-Stream announced its release in March, from open-source software developers who accused the company of using code from the PearPC project in it. Maui X-Stream later claimed it would be released under an open source license by May 1.

Read more here about Maui X-Stream's statement that it would open its CherryOS code to doubters.

But Kartes revealed that CherryOS now will not be released by the company, and is likely never to see the light of day. According to Kartes, Arben Kryeziu, the creator of the software, has left Maui X-Stream but is continuing to work on some projects unconnected to CherryOS for Maui on a contract basis.

"I wish I could be more precise about Arben, but I'm as confused as anyone else about him," Kartes added. Kartes claimed that the company had offered the rights to CherryOS to Kryeziu, but eventually had ended up retaining the rights. "At first Arben said he wanted [the rights to CherryOS], but now has changed his mind. I therefore have buried it permanently."

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