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CherryOS Not All It's Cracked Up To Be
CherryBS continues "PearPC developers who have seen CherryOS have confirmed it is a fraud, while others remaining anonymous have posted the 'strings' output that CherryOS and PearPC share, showing many function names, warning/informational message strings that exist verbatim in PearPC. Additionally, now-pulled screenshots of CherryOS, mirrored in the long thread at pearpc.net, show CherryOS's boot process revealing variable names and missing or incorrectly emulated hardware in such a way as to be specific to PearPC. Arben Kryeziu, the developer of CherryOS, claims that no code has been taken from PearPC whatsoever, and that he will release a trial version this week. However, with the amount of deception on the part of the company, and considering this wouldn't be the first time he's violated the GPL, it's hard to believe they're telling the truth. Additionally, Kryeziu now claims the "trial" may "disable modules like sound or drag and drop"...likely because PearPC itself does not support such features. To further add to the tale, someone who was likely Arben was specifically asking for video server load testing for their vx30.com video codec/server product, even specifically mentioning slashdot as a great candidate, and in the days following the CherryOS story unfolding, went back and deleted the posts. The first day, all that was left online were two videos, one of which was subsequently removed because of PearPC-specific strings in the boot process shown in the video..."
Something's a little rotten w/that Cherry? That's the pits!!!
read the mirrored thread. it's well worth the time to examine it.
The difference between PearPc and CherryOs is that Cherry has personal info about hundreds (thousands?) of users who filled their contact form.
Let's check the facts here - this guy claims to have written a mac emulator that runs at 80% native speed, all by himself... in 4 months?!! He's either a frickin' genius, or he's "embraced" some code from somewhere - and I think we all know where...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Glad i didn't take this guy up on his bet.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
while IANAL, is this necessarily illegal?? if he makes the source code for pearpc downloadable/packaged with with cherry and acknowlodges somewhere in the eula that its pearpc rebranded than while he has morally been an asshole he hasnt violated the gpl, has he?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Sebastian Ballas, PearPC's lead developer, said a screenshot of CherryOS shows a variable named "SPIRO MULTIMAX 3000," a nonsensical term Ballas claims to have invented for use in PearPC.
"It is absolutely unlikely that someone uses exactly this name for the same purpose," he said. "The way he (Kryeziu) is lying is making me angry."
When told that variables with the same names had been found in both CherryOS and PearPC, Kryeziu said programming logic often leads to variables and functions with similar, or identical, names.
"There are some functionalities that can only be done a certain way," he said. "Names are going to be similar or identical because there are only certain ways to do things."
BUAHAHHAHAAHHAHHAHA
Seems like the slashdotters in this thread figured this out first.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
if they removed any of the copyright information from the souce code files, and if they don't release the source code or make it available to the public, then they are in violation of the GPL.
.... THE GPL USES COPYRIGHT, IT DOES NOT IGNORE COPYRIGHT.
you're incorrect about naming provisions... GPL is a license, and to use copyrighted GPL code, you need to attribute the copyright holder. You may distribute/use/modify, etc... however, the original code must still be attributed to the copyright holder.
Once again -
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Downloaders don't pass the music/movies off as their own work. There is a difference although God knows what the legal difference would be.
he may lose his Cherry - say, in prison?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Allegations are surfacing that "Windows 2000" which runs at 80% the speed of Windows NT on the X86 platform, is in fact not built on top of an X86 emulator and runs directly on the hardware.
Unknown host pong.
I like this quote:
"If it isn't, it will ruin my reputation," he said. "I will end up as a bartender. I do not want to be a bartender."
Can I get mine shaken, not stirred?
for(long SPIRO_MULTIMAX_3000 = 0; SPIRO_MULTIMAX_3000 < 256; i++) {
- ...
}C'mon now, doesn't everybody?
Yeah, yeah, I post-incremented "i"...I guess it shows you how hard it is to even fake using that stupid variable name. :-)
From now on every piece of code I write is going to have a variable named SPIRO MULTIMAX 3000!
All,
To see the update from October 16th, click here.
To see the update from October 17th, click here.
I did a little investigating on CherryOS and I made several startling discoveries beyond its amazing similarity to PearPC. First, the individual who first posted on [H]ard|Forum about being given a "beta" test of CherryOS (that is, Dag33k), is in fact the same person as the alleged author of CherryOS, Arben Kryeziu. Interestingly, on HardForum Dag33k posted a link to the developer's response (alias: ArbenK) on the PearPC form. I have pretty sufficient evidence to suggest that these two people are one in the same. Look at the registration dates for Dag33k's account and Sourceforge's account for ArbenK. Coincidence?
HardForum's user information:
Sourceforge's user information:
Both dates, of course, are 2003-05-05.
Things get even more interesting, when we trap Arben Kryeziu in another lie. On the PearPC forum, he claims he doesn't speak any Albanian, as we see here:
But then strangely, earlier this year Arben (same screen name: arbishco) posted an Albanian translation for PJ IRC.
Now the shit really hits the fan. I started searching though his network of sites starting from bumpnetworks.com and found something even more interesting. If he's ripping off PearPC and violating the GPL, this is not the first time he's violated the GPL. On his bumpnetworks.com site, he has a link to piece of software he claims to have written, PdfConv (Link to image of description on website).
Now, as you'll see in the circled text, he claims it's based on Xpdf and VeryPDF. I went to VeryPDF and found their application PDF2HTML. Sure enough the product was GPL licensed and the source code is freely available (As seen in the following image). I downloaded trials of both to see how much different PdfConf was from PDF2HTML.
To Arben's credit, the interface is different from PDF2HTML, but identical in all other functions. The output from the same PDF file was almost identical. The only difference was that he took the time to remove the copyright notices from the generated html files. (As seen in this example graphical diff produced by WinMerge.) His output is on the left, PDF2HTML's output is on the right. Notice the only difference is the removal of the copyright notice.
I don't know if Arben changed any of PDF2HTML's code, but if he did, I'm not very confident he respected the GPL. From this, I have pretty good reason he is again disrespecting the GPL by pawning PearPC off as his own application. Finally, to summarize some other troublesome aspects regarding Arben, I found this slashdot post:
Sorry for all the inline images. I found this detective work fascinating, and I think its clear that Arben is perpetrating a fraud and that he personally has no respect for the GPL.
October 16th update:
I sent an email to Arben with a link to this page and a request to honor PearPC's GPL. This is the response I received:
From: CherryOS Team [mailto:mail@cherryos.com]
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 3:18 AM
To: 'Dean Beeler'
Subject: RE: PearPC is GPL (via Web form)
Hi Dean,
I am already talking to the PearPC.net webmaster, he will receive the trial as one of the first - because he treated us with respect and an open mind. I will let PearPC test the @#$@ out of CherryOS so you guys can try to prove your points. As you can see I have another product called www.vx30.com, and believe me I am not a person who wants to loose all his reputation. If you contact VeryPDF and ask them about our relationship - he will tell you that there was never one problem and I respected his rights and requests as soon they where submitted to me. I even can send you the communication between us.
I will and am respecting the PearPC GPL and the PearPC community! If people wont like the CherryOS emulation, then trash me then. If people don't want to purchase, they can use
This guy is way out there
Too bad the mass media did not think of that when given the press release. No, instead, they just blindly passed it on to news consumers. This is a real problem with our media sources. Journalists do not do their jobs. Do you think any of them will learn from this? Nah, me neither.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
It's a VERY common scam. People do this to get other rich people interested in investing. The point is not to take those investments and actually create a viable product. The point is to spend the investments and leave town when they dry up.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The difference between PearPc and CherryOs is that Cherry has personal info about hundreds (thousands?) of users who filled their contact form.
...who are now about to get an email from confirmation@apple-security-totallylegit.com asking them to confirm their credit card information in order to "ensure that their version of MacOS is fully cross-platform compliant".
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
If they can't even cover their tracks THIS BAD, no wonder they got catched
I think I just saw the head of a grammar nazi explode.
I wish there was a /.TV channel so that this would play out in a 60minutes style camera ambush on this guy.
We have seen the forum equivalent of that ambush but it is just not the same as watching this guy squirm as he is caught in his many lies.
DF
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
Link
When I'm thinking of variable names my mind often turns to thoughts of Spiro Agnew. And then of course, he was developing Cherry OS so thoughts immediatley turn to the movie Cherry 2000 and if a sequel (obviosuly named Cherry 3000) would be released.
Then you come to the thought that this method is muti to the max, and out pops SPIRO MULTIMAX 3000 right in the middle of your code. I must have that happen several times a day myself, and I don't even work with code that has anything to do with cherries - I just find them a tasty snack.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does anyone else some how find that his VX30 might be a rip off of the ogg theora java port. The fact that its listed on this site, right next to the java port of ogg theora is fishy..
The first thing I thought when I read the original /. story was that it sounded like Project David all over again.
Project David was allegedly an entirely new way of running Windows applications on Linux, covered on slashdot here which was suspiciously similar to the Wine project...
The Yahoo printing of the press release is not a bad thing. It's clearly marked as a press release. If you want to pay your $600 to BusinessWire, you too can post a press release announcing that "monkeys will shoot out of my nether eye in my office at midnight tonight." Yahoo will pick it up and run it in its financial news section, because that's what it does with press releases as they come along the wire.
This is a good thing - pre-Web, getting your hands on a company's press releases was more time consuming and sometimes expensive. I prefer being able to research what a company says about itself. Of course, believing what a company says about itself is another matter, but why would a person read something marked "press release" without a skeptical eye?
Did you know, for example, that the people quoted in press releases generally don't say what they're quoted as saying? No indeed, even if multiple companies are involved, a marcom person wrote the thing, ran it by someone else's marcom person, got approval, and put it out on the wire. In some cases, the quoted person doesn't even know they've been quoted. "I'm very excited about the prospect of monkeys flying out of UrgleHoth's nether eye," said Dr. Dew. "I'm just glad they're not going to fly out of mine."
And I'm puzzled what your problem is with the Wired piece. The writer clearly states the claims as "claims" - so carefully, in fact, that I was more skeptical after reading it than I was before.
That said, I wouldn't complain if news sources did a better job aggregating related stories so that it's as easy to find out that someone's a pathological liar as it is to find out whatever they said before it was verified as a lie.
I used to work for a company that violated the license of an open source piece of software. They stole the code verbatim and I didn't realize this until I had left the company and was searching for an open source alternative to their software. I stumbled across the open source version and though "Hey, they use the same variable and function names as us...hey, they use the same headers...hey, they use the same conversion arrays...hey, we stole their product!"
Unfortunately, they are making millions of dollars off of this open source software and the original author isn't seeing a penny. I feel bad, but I am one of two people who actually saw the source code (the other being the owner of the company).
If I said anything the company would instantly know who snitched on them and I'm not going to deal with those repurcussions.
They kept good tabs on making sure no one else could figure out they stole open source code and they continue to make large amounts of money on it today. So yes, not everyone is as clumsy as this person is.
We grammar Nazis aren't all mean-spirited pedants unable to make allowances for foreigners, and the use of "catched" rather than "caught" is a clear indication that the grandparent post wasn't written by a native English speaker. Do you, on the other hand, have any excuse for failing to capitalise "Nazi", or must our collective wrath descend on you?
Explain the situation to the FSF and somebody would probably approach them.
If the code is similar chances are symbol table information / exports in DLLs etc would allow binary comparisons to be used to establish a connection.
That way source wouldn't need to be visible and you'd be clean.
Failing that tip off the author - if you don't work there anymore and you feel bad why keep quiet, and then tell the world anonymously?
To give Wired a bit of credit, they actually continued to follow the story (including trying out a copy of CherryOS and then investigating and assisting in proving the fraud claims). See the article posted today.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Do you, on the other hand, have any excuse for failing to capitalise "Nazi", or must our collective wrath descend on you?
That's "descend upon." Clown.
Specks
Batteries not included
Only on /. would a post about a post about nether-monkey-flight be modded to +5, Insightful.
That, my friends, is the beauty of free speech.
Only on /. would a post about a post about a post about nether-monkey-flight be modded to +5, Insightful.
That, my friends, is the beauty of recursion.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Only on /. would a post about a post about a post about a post about nether-monkey-flight and the beauty of recursion be modded to +5, Insightful.
That, my friends, is the beauty of Slashdot.
Now mod this insightful, please.
On on /. would a post about a ... ah fuck it, just give me my free karma!!
Piracy is different when you start selling pirated works online.
In civilised countries, piracy *begins* when you start selling the works. That's what piracy *is*.
Copyright infringement without monetary gain is just called "copyright infringement".