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"Future Tech" vs KDE Developer
I've been a huge fan of Liquid for some time. I've been compiling releases and using on my laptop. The project isn't nearly as ambitious as Enlightenment, but it has some interesting UI ideas and it looks good. I was really pleased when I found out that Mosfet was going to have a shot at continuing the development of the program for FT under the KDE License. At this point, FT ("The Total Linux Company," according to their website) mentioned a few of the features in Liquid as being part of the benefits of FT's distribution. This was to set them apart from "Other" distributions, although even at the time I found it funny, as The final decision in selecting one RPM based distribution over another would rarely be tipped in favor of the one with translucent menus ;)
Anyway the Changelog contains the following line:
* Future Technologies' name has been removed. They hired me to do KDE development, but failed to pay me after promising to do so three times over the span of several months :( I still haven't seen any of the paychecks they said they would send me, and they even went as far as sending me a fake FedEx number. Now they are saying they can't afford to pay their employees.
And soon after Mosfet's website announced that he was leaving Linux and Liquid was dead. Unable to afford to develop Liquid for free, he was seeking work in the windows world.
According to the site, on 10/28, Dr. Giovanni asked Mandrakesoft, the host of Mosfet.org to take down the site, under threat of legal action. But since I see the site still there, it looks like they are standing their ground which is a good thing.
Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story is, beyond a warning to keep both eyes open. There is a lot of questionable stuff that goes on in this world. Be careful.
(I've emailed Giovanni from FT but have yet to hear back from him.)
If the story is true, isn't it interesting that they can't afford to pay this guy for his work but they can afford the legal costs to sue him? Or maybe they got a lawyer to take it on contingency. If they won the lawsuit, would they have to pay him out of their winnings?
This is a sad case of an open source software developer getting burned by companies promising large and delivering little. It just shows how important it is to keep control of your intellectual property until the checks roll in.
Seems to me that, if the facts are as stated, Mosfet has a clear mechanic's lein on the software. If it was done as a work for hire, and he was not paid, then he owns the copyright free and clear.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I beleive Mosfet has a right to sue FT for making downloads of FTLiquid available even though they haven't paid him for his work. He should still retain the copyrights to his work and be able to control the distribution of it. Or does that not play in the Open source framework?
It's a shame that a decent dude lost his apartment, had a sore ass, and has to deal with a loser CEO.
Good luck Mosfet, maybe we should start a charity fund.
If this were all closed source (proprietary) tech, then there would be no such thing as a changelog, or it would be internal, and also proprietary.
Goat sex free since 2001
It's good to know that people are always paid correctly when they write proprietary software. Thanks also for the study with a control group showing the statistically significant difference between the two. Too bad the postercomment filter ate it, but we can imagine it is there!
IANYL
Assuming that everything in the story is true, and that the contract included terms to pay Mosfet for his work, then FT is in breach of contract, and any consideration that Mosfet assigned to FT through the contract (including assignment of IP rights) is void. So all such considerations remain with Mosfet, and FT has no rights at all. In fact, Mosfet has the right to sue for breach of contract, which allows you to up the damages way beyond the real damages.
Of course, this has a lot of assumptions in it. I certainly haven't read the contract, and I have no way to know that what Mosfet and FT are saying about the situation is even remotely true.
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
Their site looks like it's been designed by a group of kids for a school project.
Liquid is very damn cool though, if you don't mind wasting some cpu cycles for your eye's pleasure :)
give me all your garmonbozia
Mosfet is maybe a good programmer - but he surely doesn't know either to do person to person work (meaning - to keep business relationships straight and know how to work with people "above" him)...
Go ahead - ask any KDE developer about Mosfet behavior, how he cannot accept responsibility with deadlines (no mosfet, you cannot add big features after freeze and after everyone submitted everything!), how he leaves projects dead in the cold after he started them (remember Pixie? his daily desktop screenshot maybe? etc..) and how he's kicked out of every job (Mandrake, thekompany, and others who simply didn't want to hire him because his 5 years old behavior)
So no, I don't know the story exactly about his relations with Future Technologies - but if I might guess - he managed once again to piss off few people there...
MOSFET - GROW UP!
YoGy
Carl
Vote Libertarian
maybe they call themselves Future Tech because whenever you ask about the salary, they talk in the future tense
.
I used to be a full-time employee for an animation studio. I quit, and later came back and worked freelance for them for a week. They didn't pay me. I bugged them for three months, and finally threatened them saying that I was in contact with the Department of Labor, which I was. They finally paid up. I suggest the same to this guy.
Mosfet should look at the fine print of his contract to make sure he has fulfilled all of his obligations, including notification of his employer that they had breached the contract and that he was severing it. With common contractual provisions in place, it's quite possible that Mosfet himself could be found in breach of contract, if he did not submit a formal WRITTEN letter to his employer (at a contractually defined postal address) notifying them of their failings and his cancellation of the contract. BTW: has Mosfet also submitted a bill? If Mosfet hasn't precisely adhered to the contract himself, he may find himself effectively trading his failure(s) for his employer's and wind up with zilch, nada, nothing in return.
I've seen a few of these disputes with ex-employees. In many cases, the ex-employee posts material that is inaccurate (or even downright lies). Even so, the company can only hurt itself by getting into a public debate, and usually is advised to avoid this.
Of course, it is also possible the facts are exactly as he stated. Without more information, you just can't tell.
QNiX is a new style that's been getting alot of attention lately:
http://apps.kde.com/nfinfo.php?vid=4234
For more themes and styles for KDE there is a new website as well:
http://www.kde-look.org/
Samawi I
Most people who settle in for the long haul of writing a debugging a new theme do so because they want it to look like something they've already seen and liked. Having written a few themes myself, it's easy to say "make something totally new" than it is to make something totally new that doesn't suck.
One of the more original themes for KDE is the default high-color theme. It doesn't look like anything else out there, but it doesn't suck either. My third favorite after the default and Liquid is Qnix. Of course you won't like it, as it emulates the QNX look.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Come on, who didn't burst out laughing when they saw Future Tech's website?
This may be slightly offtopic, but my thought came about because of how one problem with a developer can cascade into problems for other people, organizations, and companies.
:)
What if somebody began contributing code to the Linux Kernel? It might take a while for them to develop a good reputation, but perhaps over a year or two make a number of important contributions to the system. Then after they've thoroughly integrated their code into the kernel it turns out that their code violates somebody's intelletcual property. Be that copyright, patent law, etc. How would that effect the Kernel?
What I was considering is that this might be a back door tactic that somebody like Microsoft could use. If they could get people to infest the kernel with copyrighted and patented code it could really hose up the works it seems.
I don't know the feasibility of such an attack, but I figured I'd throw it out there and see what people think. Please feel free to gun down my post
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This shit happens every day. Maybe it's time for an Open Source blacklist?
(not that I'd want to have anything to do with it.)
I for one am glad that they pissed off mosfet, I've been waiting for continued development of Liquid for quite sometime. Go Mosfet!
You can't copyright colours. Apple cannot stop me from using a total rip off of the OSX interface, so long as I don't use their logo,
Actually, that's not quite correct.
While you can't copyright colors, you must also remember that AQUA is not a color. But an overall design and functionality spec.
Now that you can protect, and it's called a trade dress.
A trade dress is a visual representation of an object that identifies a product to it's manufacturer.
Basically, this is what Apple used to defend it's iMac from cheap knock-offs, like what eMachine had with it's eOne.
I especially like the Noatun skin section, I had no idea that there were such cool skins out there that Noatun could use. Now if only Noatun would stop skipping and get more playlist features, it would be better than XMMS.
Oh, and for a cool wallpaper no matter what desktop you are using, try this artful take on a crash :-)
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
If I understand this correctly, FT made a contract with Mosfet to pay him to code specific software. He performed his part of the bargain, but they breached the contract.
Now THEY claim that they are going to sue!? If anything, HE should be suing THEM. Given their bad faith threats he'd have a good chance at getting more than actual damages.
By the way, it sounds a whole lot like he's an independent contractor instead of an employee, so unless their contract is written and explicitly signs the copyright over, even if they do pay him, he still owns the copyright. See CCNV v Reid.
It's no wonder that they "can't pay their employees", they're charging $49.95 for a beta version of the FTOSX. Not only are they not going to sell enough of these to pay for a developer to build anything, they aren't going to come close to paying a legal team to fight the OSX name usage battle.
They also have attorneys on staff, and will work with law firms in other cities if it comes to a lawsuit and you need local representation.
They take 20%, which is quite a bit, but note that they specialize in large business collections.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
About the only thing I see in Future Tech's future is a big fat lawsuit from Apple. Check this out:
http://www.FutureTG.com/FTOSX/
It also appears that they were unable to pay a web designer.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I'm all for people making their own certificates too. In fact I did. But that's not what we are talking about, is it?
.), I'm just saying that I find any business that makes the trade off of saving three hundred bucks in exchange for looking very questionable deserves to look, well, questionable.
Anyway, it looks really bad for a company to do it. I'm not saying that I love Verisign (I hate it, but what can I do? Aww, Alderan is so far away . .
Finally, take a look at your browser (makes almost no difference which one) and you will find that Verisign is far from a monopoly. There are dozens of SAs in most browsers. Mozilla 0.9.5, for example (since that's what I'm running), has about 100 keys (or "built in object tokens") from about 32 CAs, about 25 of which look to be acutal seperate companies.
And of course you can add more. So, to draw a parallel, let's say you could buy a new computer with any OS out of 100 from about 25 different companies. Wouldn't seem like much of a monopoly, would it?
-Peter
Apple can't stop you from doing anything, so long as you don't give it away.
Steven Poldge (spelled wrong? if so, sorry Steve.) of Epic Games programmed the original Quake bot, the reaper bot. It was a closed source project, and expressly forbid the redistribution of his bot or source code.
This didn't stop people from hacking and re-releasing, especially to fix the infamous QC1.01 "disapearing weapon" bug, but technically, Steven could have sued - and he would have won.
This doesn't mean that in the privacy of your own home you couldn't hack the reaper - or anything else for that matter - yourself and use it for your own personal use, but that dosn't give you the right to distribute it.
The same applies to intellectual property.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
If there is no written contract and if he has received no payments, they probably don't have a legal leg to stand on. Why any of this is relevant to Slashdot, I don't know, however.
For another exciting episode of "As the Hard Drive Turns"! Open-Source soap opera at its finest..
Different countries have different laws for handling this sort of situations. Here in Finland, the state quarantees the salary of workers, if the employer is unable to pay it. I think this requires that the company has been filed for bankruptcy.
Future Tech seems to be an Italian company, with a branch in US, and Mosfet appears to live in US too, so I guess this would be handled according to US law (read the work contract and check the employment and contract laws). Somehow I doubt that US government would quarantee salaries in bankruptcy situations.
I don't have a faintest idea about Italian law, and I don't think there's an EU directive for this situation.
IANAL
And of course there's always Free SSL for free one-year signed server certs. (That's http://www.freessl.com for all you non-clickers.)
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I don't know about this place. Seems like those old dodgy linux startups we used to hear about when there was more ready money in the linux world.
I surfed over to the site as one of the comments mentioned that it was somewhat funny and tried to go to the store to see what their products would be. Konqueror halted me telling me that their certificate is self-signed and thus may not be trustworthy
Sure enough, the Certificate and the Issuer have the same address, email contact, everything!!
What? And perpetuate hate, spite and the use of force? If you do that - if you become like that - you lose instantly. Not just this battle, but the whole war.
Reading between the lines, both Future and Mosfet are behaving like losers. Mosfet has a history of being difficult to deal with (but creative, nevertheless), Future have a similar reputation as a denial-of-reality get-rich-quick company. A match made in hell. A good thing to steer clear of, not inflame.
If you disagree, post a reply using your real name. I'd also rather see a reply than a moderation.
-- Want to fight terror? Why go to Afghanistan? Why not start at home?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is not the first time Mosfet huffed and puffed. He has done it to KDE. Not once, but twice. In a smaller way, he did it to Mandrakesoft. Now he did it to Future Technologies. I am a big KDE advocate. I also use Mandrake Linux. I follow what happens with the KDE Community, and it is apparent that Mosfet has serious "mood swings."
I would assume that he's hiding something, just because of his rep.
Works better visually.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... that it is so easy to be judged and then placed in the central square for the ritual tomato throwing.
I mean, come on.... if it is true, then by all means, string them up by their balls. But where is the proof?
What if I put up a page where I said that Slashdot hired me, and then refused to pay me - would you run that story? If I said it was Microsoft then? I thought so.
Maybe you know a lot about this guy, things that are not mentioned around here, but so far, all I see is this guy ranting about he didn't get any money from this company. Which may, or may not be true.
Of course, we want it to be true, so we can point our finger at, and hopefully ruin this bad, bad company. What if this guy is lying then? Slashdot is in no way almighty, but it does have some impact on the linux world, or at least we would like to think so. It is not nice to write such about a company that may be struggling without any proof.
So, where is the proof?
Without having read too much, I can assure you that this Giovanni character is evil to the core. According to my sons, he is responsible for the reprehensible actions of "Team Rocket" and directed the research that lead to MewTwo!
I understand that the quest for the ultimate Chinpokomon is important and we all must destroy the evil power. So this Giovanni guy must be shamed out of the Chinpokomon arena forever.
But please do not be angry with me. I have a very small penis. It's not huge like your penis...
Which should be called "Free-trialSSL" since, like the stereotypical dope-man "the first one's free."
And this really wouldn't have impressed me any more then the self-signed cert did, since GeoTrust isn't built into mozilla. Not that being built into Mozilla is my ultimate standard, but that I would have still been aware that the company had made the tradeoff mentioned in my erlier post.
-Peter
This is kinda ironic as after he had a 3 year old like tantrum (if I can do exactly what I want at the expense of all the other developers involved in KDE I'm taking my ball home) and left KDE, he posted on his web page something like "neer neer, I have another paying job to continue working on KDE anyway". Now it turns out that he didn't even get paid for it.
My guess is that you'll see a few posts that aren't so kind to Mosfet. Remember this is just one side of the story, what happened while he was at Future Tech and knowing his attitude he sure pissed off a few people.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Future Tech hired the man. He does some work, they fork over some money. Plain and simple.
Except that they apparentlt didn't fork over the money. Then got upset when he didn't hand over the work. By the sound of things they want to have their cake and eat it.
You don't go publicly badmouthing a company and burning your bridges because of private business dealings gone sour. That's what you'd expect from a 14 year old who hasn't been around.
Yes, but this does not mean FT must publish the modifications. If they own the code, they can keep it to themselves if they prefer. The GPL only requires that if you publish your work, you must license it under the GPL -- if you don't license your work to anyone, you're not forced to do anything.
Only if FT granted him a license to use the code. Again, if FT decides to not license the code they own at all, it is not legal for anyone to use it.
I don't know what kind of contract was made in this particular case and whether or not Mosfet was allowed to license the code, so I won't comment on this case. But generally, you shouldn't assume you have a license to use code you develop for someone else just because it's GPL-based -- you do have a license for the original code, but for the modifications, you don't have one unless it was granted to you.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
obSimpsons:
Mosfet: "Omigod, RMS! I thought you were dead!"
RMS: "I was!"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The point is that we don't actually know if he did they work that was laid out for him or if he just went off an did whatever he felt like. FT doesn't was the copyright to his work, they want him to remove his changelog that blasts them. While I think that is silly (unless there is real slander in there), we can't all immediately think that mosfet is in the right in the transaction.
-no broken link
I had the misfortune to do purchase a product from FT. As a result, I believe Mosfet in this scenario.
The product still hasn't arrived, several months after it's promissed date. If it were worth more, I would sue them. I suspect that they calculated on this. But the way they reportedly treated Mosfet is quite consistent with the way they treated me. And they still have the gall to send me ads.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
From http://www.linuxutilities.org/Why.html:
"Therefore, there are a lot of work to do, to simplify
At least I am confortable knowing they are as professional as slashdot!
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Only if the capitalists can't figure out how to get out of having to pay you or don't handle their finances so that paying the workers comes before other expenses and other creditors.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.