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P2P vs. The Clones
smash writes "Rebranding software then loading it with spyware and adware (or just selling it for profit) has become a recent trend with oversea individuals trying to make a few bucks. We all remember the KaZaA Gold, don't we? Shareaza, which recently went open source under the GPL, has been subject to a similar type of theft by a company going by the name RockSoft Development. Surprisingly enough, their software labelled as 'Go Music' hasn't been pulled from C|Net's Download.com after more than a week."
This doesn't change the main point of your argument, but you are slightly misinformed about what the GPL says about selling software. The GPL allows you to take the software and sell it at any price you want, bundled or not. However, you must either
A) include the source with sold binary, or
B) make it available seperately at additional cost.
It is just this additional cost that is limited to reasonable compensation.
Doesn't the original KaZaA client have it's own spyware? I don't see a reason to cry over someone robbing a company of spyware revenue in favor of their own spyware revenue. Now, if someone robs the client to remove the spyware altogether (like KaZaA Lite supposedly did), I'm all for that.
Kazaa came bundled with a client for BDE which was used to sell your spare cpu cycles to someone else. Basically like a huge distributed computing project, that the end user had absolutely no idea about.. I believe this single act kick-started the whole anti-adware/spyware movement.
I'd recommend using KazaaLite K++, which has removed all of the extra FUD. Although, good luck finding a legitimate download. 98% of the files on Kazaa are fakes, planted by the RIAA to dissuade you from downloading music. In the end, it is not going to matter what client you use, if all of the files on the network are bogus.