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MusicCity's Morpheus violating GPL
dotslash writes "The new Morpheus Preview Edition client [download.com] is actually just a fork of Gnucleus an open source GPLd Gnutella client. Upon installation Morpheus PE displays the GPL and asks the user to accept. It is currently being distributed without source in violation of article 3 of the GPL. Gnucleus developers are not too happy about this.
This Morpheus client is being downloaded by thousands of frustrated Morpheus users who have been cutoff the FastTrack/Kazaa network and are now migrating to Gnutella. The violation of the GPL is blatant and will also be the first glimpse of the GPL for many of these new users. It seems like the executives at MusicCity have decided that they prefer free 'as in beer' not 'as in speech.'" Update: 03/03 05:10 GMT by T : It looks like the source is available now, gpl.txt and all.
Actually, the source for Morpheous is available. If you just look down at the bottom of the menu on the left you see a link called "Source Code." If you click on that link it lets you download the source.
I downloaded the Morpheus client just after the previous story about it changing to the gnutella network and there was a link on the front page to the source code for the new client. I currently have a file "mpesrc1.zip" sitting on my desktop which contains source code. Admittedly the zip file then contains a folder called gnucleus1 so it may be the original, unmodified code rather than the morpheus code. Anyone else see this link or have the ability to analyse the code?
A quick download and scan of the readme.txt file shows that it is indeed Gnucleus source. The GPL violation here is merely in the advertizement -- the source is quite throughly public; I'm sure the flaw will be corrected soon.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
Kazaa came out with an update for their client a few weeks back. The way that the updates for Kazaa and Morpheus work is that they slowly spread because whenever you connect to a node that has the updated version you are forced to update. Then if anyone happens to connect to you they have to update.
So Kazaa made an updated version and let their updated version spread to all Kazaa users. Then either by a preset date or some sort of signal they activated the one "feature" of this update: to give all Morpheus users the bad version error. Really underhanded.
Right now sometimes on Morpheus you might still connect, depending on if you are lucky and connect to another Morpheus node, but you are only in contact with a small part of the network.
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
But the Gnucleus team is really happy with Morpheus. The "news rant" i think was due to the MusicCity attitude. They didn't even the contact Gnucleus team.
But they indeed are very proud, and happy. Take a look:
http://www.gnucleus.com/general/clones.html
Here's the text:
"Morpheus: Also a post-Gnucleus 1.0 clone. Wow, this was unexpected, 50 million users and they switch over to the Gnucleus engine... uhm.. welcome aboard!"
unfinished: (adj.)
followed by the rest of the GPL.
You are just plain wrong, sorry.
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
You do not recall correctly, Anonymous Coward.
giFT started out as a FastTrack client, but changed to OpenFT once FastTrack locked them out. And they've been that way ever since--and now over a terabyte of files are being traded therein at this very moment. Small potatoes compared to KaZaa, but it's a start.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Not only did CmdrTaco not check this out before posting, but Timothy's update is VERY misleading. He says "It looks like the source is available now, gpl.txt and all." (emphasis mine) Well, looks to me like it was available BEFORE too if you bothered to look. It's not like all the sudden they said "Holy CRAP, look at this story on /., we better get our source code up..."
Sheeesh...
The Gnucleus source distribution also has this problem (in addition to tons of warnings, at least under VC7). I think you'll find all the files that should be under res\ are actually in zlib\. You can hand pick them out and move them to res\ or if you just want to compile quickly just duplicate zlib\ over to res\.
EOF
My build is neither efficient or great, but it did end up working (had to fix their code, couple of missing declarations missing in class headers). I also had to create the icons and bitmaps (i did a horrible job, but they worked).
Here's the screenshot.
I stand corrected. :)