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CherryOS Mac Emulator Resurfaces
Clash writes "Following its initial announcement and subsequent controversy last October, Mac emulator CherryOS has finally been released. Its creator, Arben Kryeziu, found himself in hot water last year amid claims the software was simply stolen from the open source PearPC project. With the code now under public scrutiny, it appears that such allegations are true. According to BetaNews, CherryOS boots up in the exact same manner as PearPC, and its error messages and source files are nearly identical. The emulator also includes MacOnLinuxVideo, which is the same driver used by PearPC to speed up graphics. The CherryOS configuration file also closely mirrors that used by PearPC. Trial download without registration found here."
Sounds like some of the people on slashdot are developing respect for intellectual property. Be careful, our willingness to respect property is what makes it real. If too many people start to respect intellectual property, it will become as real as normal property.
"So, how would BSD developers feel about creating something, having it ripped off..."
The fact is that BSD developers are beyond that and the lack of ego is codified into the license. Its a much more 'mature' license in some ways.
As such, you can't 'rip off' BSD applications as long as you leave the copyright files alone. You don't even have to display them, you have to leave the credits in there somewhere and we are happy.
This post is licensed under the BSD. I'd prefer that you kept it under BSD, but if you want to edit it and take credit for it, feel free to do so.
Yes Emulation is fine , Although Stealing someones work and claming it as your own work is unethical and illegal in the way that it violates PearPCs license . This is not a DMCA type nonsence Copyright issue , This is blatently rebranding someones work without permission and selling it as yourown .
No matter how you feel about Intelectual property , This is immoral , unethical and illegal and rightly so
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Let me quote something...
Which means that they'd still have to credit you.
You mean besides lying about it, and not telling people they have a right to the source code?
(He should have supplied the License allong with the binary)
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
The open source community still has it. No loss of property, therefore no theft.
For people who believe in sharing, GPL zealots are incredibly possesive about intellectual property.
The distinction that your missing, is that he violated the GPL when he didn't acknowledge the PearPC work that he derivied (if he actually did any deriving (other than just changing every instance of "PearPC" with "CherryOS" (which any of us on slashdot could easy accomplish with 5 lines of perl or shell script)))
He didn't enhance the product in any way, he just renamed it.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Under the GPL any software can be "hijacked" and sold on the commercial standpoint as another name.
Yes you can sell it under another name and ask a billion for it... But you still have to acknowledge that there is GPL code in it and have to supply the source code upon request.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
If cherryos violates GPL, is someone going to actually try to do something about it? Where's the lawsuit? If not, the GPL might as well not exist.
More exactly, you can sell a program ripped of from GPL project. But then you also have to provide source code and grant your customers the right to re-distribute as specified in the GPL.
If you don't do that, you are violating the GPL and asking to be sued.
If you follow the GPL, others can re-distribute YOUR program which will limit the price you can charge without being undercut by others. Linux distributions are a good example for this:
Companies like Novell/SuSE can get away with charging up to 100 Euros for a nice package of installation disks, manuals and some installation support. But you won't find a 1000 Euro distribution without some proprietary software add-ons or extended support included.
As opposed to the server versions of Windows, where the OS alone may cost some thousand dollars.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Happens all the time. If anyone claims CherryOS is a bit suspect perhaps the same could be said about a number of the *BSDs. Ok , he's been a bit underhand but as far as I can see he's done nothing wrong and hasn't violated the GPL.
That's where you're wrong not only for the OBVIOUS reason "if you fork a GPL software it must remain GPL" (and I just downloaded the installer and afaik the code IS NOT distributed along), but also because he denied having forked PearPC, where the GPL forces to keep the copyleft of the original authors (ok you can still say "it's my software I coded it all alone last saturday" and let the copyleft in the code, but then everybody can read it if it's GPL'd, so I think giving credit to the legitimate authors is something that the GPL implies)
Even if the PearPC licence had been more permissive (MIT or BSD style), he would still be a moron who cannot even admit he just took the code.
In the current case however, he's just a thief and I hope the PearPC developpers will get some support to sue and get the GPL tested in an US court.
Absolutely. And the way to deal with it is to prosecute them for copyright violation. They have used the GPL'd code in a way that neither copyright law nor the GPL permits, and they should be taken to court for it.
I don't know about any of that. I think it's more of "someone's taking from our community" is the feeling. Either this guy is a moron or someone bigger and darker is out there funding this guy's legal defense.
It should be pretty obvious that this guy will have legal action taken against him at any moment. He has no reputation as a business owner that I can tell so he has nothing to lose. But this case would have interesting value to those businesses out there who have and who would use GPL code in their stuff. I don't think I'm being paranoid or dramatic when I suggest the possibility is there. After all, isn't it Microsoft that ultimately funded SCO's legal machine? Or at least partly?
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and I know that no one could disagree with that.
And what if some crazy court decides that the GPL is invalid? Woldnt CherryOS still be guilty, as they now have no license to redistribute at all?
Dvorak on Doomtech
Ok, stolen? We can't have it both ways. If it isn't stealing music, but copyright infringment instead, how is this any different? Just cause it's not the **AA being ripped off it's stealing now? Gimme a break.
That's not a risk, it's the point of BSD licensing. Just because "the community" flies into a rage about "taking from 'us' and not giving anything back" doesn't mean the developers feel that way. Why do you think they decided to use those licensing terms?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It is illegal. Just not stolen.
As to whether CherryOS is illegal or not - Well, the only way to determine this is to acquire a copy and check for violations of the GPL.
Patents as such aren't wrong. It's the current implementation of both.
The idea behind patents is:
1) Work hard or some novel idea
2) Get it to work.
3) Patent it and start selling it without anybody in the way.
4) Profit!!! - for funding more research on more novel ideas.
How it actually works is:
1) Find some obvious thing nobody thought to patent because it's so blatantly obvious
2) Patent it. Getting it to work is optional.
3) Wait till a bunch of people use it, then sue them.
4) Profit!!! - for funding more lawyers.
Copyright is similarly screwed up, though in most cases significantly higher degree of creativity is needed. Copyrighting silence, copyrighting a single black dot isn't as notorious as patenting triple click. Although in the Trademark field things are VERY screwed up. (site Mobil-X shut down because it's too similar to "Asterix" ????)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
If they cared they wouldn't have used a licence which allowed it, so your question makes no sense.
Put another way, it wouldn't have been `ripped off' but `used as intended'.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Not a legal precedent, obviously, but if unscrupulous developers see there's no retribution for doing this, they're just going to do it again.
If music were GPLed (as it was for centuries), making personal copies (as was done ever since tape recorders and radios came into existence) would not be copyright infringment.
What CherryOS did was beyond this. They pretended that someone elses "music" was their own and sold it as their own. That's plagiarizing which has been frowned upon since people put pen to paper.
Yes. It's stealing and no there is no conflict.
The GPL states that a person can download, make changes, redistribute, and sell a particular product. How does this violate the GPL? For Instance, If this violated the GPL than Trustix, Mandrake, Conectiva, CentOS, and many many more could have been taken to court a very long time ago for doing the exact same thing. The onlything CentOS got a slap on the wrist for was having the words "Redhat" in their code.
Because copyrights are healthy and patents, particularly patents on intangibles like software, are unhealthy. They're both artificial constructions of law, but their effects on people are quite different.
Your question is a bit like asking: This looks very like one of the food threads that run here regularly, but with everyone on the other side of the line. If fresh fruit & veg is so right, why are McDonalds burgers so wrong?
Copyrights promote creativity and competition. Patents punish creativity and competition. (And intangibles patents are worse as they also attack the basic human right of self-expression.)
-- Jamie
Parent is obviously not Flamebait , And i will take the karma hit for being offtopic here ,
All he is stating is the fact that apple didnt rip off xerox and that the grandparent is obviously a bad troll
if you want to read about the Xerox GUI and the money apple paid to study it and improvments that were made by apple enginers to the design then a quick google search on the topic will help enlighten
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
There is a _huge_ difference between code reuse and stealing code. If this guy simply was trying to sell CherryOS (really just the GPLed PearPC) but he kept it as a GPLed work, there would be no legal problems for him.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I thought you couldn't "steal" something if you were just making a copy of it?
As usual, in CherryOS articles, copyright infringement of GPL code mysteriously becomes theft. In P2P piracy articles, copyright infringement mysteriously becomes an okay natural culture movement.
That's not a risk, it's the point of BSD licensing.
You most certainly cannot use someone elses code under the BSD license and pretend you wrote it, which is what's happened in this case.
If Pear had been released under the BSD license, the 'developers' of CherryOS would still be in violation of the license by claming they wrote it and that it's an origional work.
If you don't care if someone takes your work and gets full credit for it, then there is no point in licensing it under the BSD license, just release it as Public Domain and be done with it, but it's rather implausible to claim that those who release code under the BSD license don't care about getting credit when that's the one big restriction it has.
Illegal, as in copyright infringement? As in piracy?
/. position on this.
I'm confused about the
" Nope, from the moment you modified the original source code to replace it with your own code, yours are still derived work even it does not have any source code in the latest release."
this is sco's ladder theory and it is incorrect. if the final code does not contain any of the original work, it is not "derived." there are standard tests for code comparison [eg the abstraction, filtration comparison test]. it does help your defence in court though to clean room the development in case of any accidental code similarities.
"Although I am not sure if Linux should be known as a derived work of Minix."
it is not. linus built it on a "framework" of minix. in other words, the computer he used for the coding process ran minix. other than that they are not the same os. minix is a microkernel os and linux uses a monolithic kernel. even ast [creator of minix] agrees that linux is not derived from minix. it is a new, posix compliant operating sytem.
sum.zero
Whadaya mean, "the /. position"? There is no one /. position.
The sane position, though, is this:
CherryOS isn't stolen code, because copyright infringement and theft are two different things. It does, however, contain code which is illegally distributed without a license (since the auther fails to accept and follow the terms of the GPL), hence its authors are evil bastards.
" as long as I am not making copies and giving/selling them to others." that IS 100% what "cherryos" is doing. they are selling pearpc without the copyright holders permission.
Nobody in the tech world seems to grasp that defending your legal rights costs money. Every time Slashdot does a story about another round of Cease and Desist letters, we get a ton of posts saying, in effect, "That's obviously lame, people should just ignore them." But the sad fact is, you don't know how lame any legal action is until you've gotten legal advice. Nor can you take legal action without that overpaid guy in the suit.
Well, if you're very smart and very patient, you can represent yourself in Small Claims Court. But that's not applicable to this kind of issue.