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CherryOS On Hold
aberkvam writes "MacWorld is reporting that CherryOS is "On Hold - until further notice." Does this mean that they are going to confirm that they used PearPC's code or is this just a delaying tactic due to the potentially pending lawsuit? Slashdot has covered this saga before."
Maybe holding the release because a sold copy of CherryOS would give PearPC's lawyers ammo for bigger damages?
Which reminds me, if your really want Mac OS, then just get the real thing.
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
I read on the internet that the parent poster touches little kids. I read this on a blog several months ago. Why does the parent still even have a home to sleep in? Justice is too damned slow.
While i think it is wrong, it must say:
It is not stealing/piracy/buzzword of the week. It is copyright infrigment.
Freedom or George Bush
I'm not talking about not having due process. I'm talking about having due process not take years. This isn't about something that's been done behind closed doors. This fuckbag is a commercial pirate hiding behind the thinnest veil. It's like he burned copies of an X-Men DVD and put a label on it calling it Y-People, and selling them as a product of his own.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The nice thing about the GPL not holding up in court is that all code released under the GPL will not become part of the public domain. Therefore any company trying to profit from GPL code cannot claim the GPL is invalid and use the code. The GPL is the only thing that makes the code legal to distribute.
Why does everyone still care? It became incredibly obvious about 2 weeks after the first beta came out that it was simply an alternative GUI for PearPC. Knowing that, people should have stopped paying attention to it except for noting that it is another instance of someone abusing open source code and EULAs. You don't think that they would/could ever release a full version of their product, sell it for money, and live up to the performace claims?
Probably getting so much coverage because CherryOS made absurb claims first of all (IIRC they claimed G5 emulation at 100% speed, which IIRC due to the alvitec unit makes pretty much impossible), now is so blatently commiting copyright infringement on PearPC's code (IIRC the first clue came from a screenshot of CherryOS' boot screen displaying a line of nonsense text which the PearPC team put in, and binary comparisons on the demo have backed that up), while claiming that they wrote the whole thing and dismissing claims in an absurd way (claiming it was entirely a coinsidence that the text mentioned earlier was the same) and constantly changing their story (IIRC first they said one person did it, then they said a dev had been fired who used GPL code and the code removed, then denied all accusations of GPL code completely).
Basically it gets so much coverage because it's so unbelievable how stupid they are.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
[Copyright infringement that identifies the author and copyright infringement that does not identify the author are] the same thing ethically speaking.
Not necessarily. There's copyright infringement (violating a government-granted monopoly), and then there's plagiarism (not identifying the author). European "moral rights" make plagiarism an offence per se, while the United States handles plagiarism under the "passing off" provisions of trademark law and under 17 USC 1202 of copyright law.
Waaa, waaa! It's not theft it's copyright infringement. Waaa, waaa!
Forget the whales - save the babies.
or whateverelsely
controversially?
Arguably?
Considering the inevitable arguments regarding the fact that the owners still have their software, and are in no way deprived of the use of it, there are many people who disagree.
Religion doesn't enter into it.
Morally, morality is a personal thing.
Practically there's a key difference. The PearPC creators still have their code.
If you're arguing that it fits your definition of stealing, fine. I'll argue its jaywalking because it fits my definition of jaywalking. But then we might as well be talking different languages.
The only reason to call it stealing is because the term has negative connotations. How about using a less emotive term?
Indeed, I stand corrected. But I figure that difference is only an argument of semantics. Seems pretty much the same thing (in this case) to me.
It is not even close. Nobody can "steal" GPL'd code - it is there for all to see and modify as they see fit. That's the whole point.
What you can't do is take that code, modify it, sell the binaries and then refuse to give your contributions back to the community. That is what the CherryOS people have done, and that is a GPL violation. As the copyrighted code is provided under the GPL only under the terms of said GPL, violation of it is by extension a copyright violation.
But you can't "steal" something that is freely available, so it is not just semantics whether or not it was "theft".
Yes, it was wrong - that's not the issue. But just as we're constantly berating the RIAA/MPAA for their hyperbole on such issues, we have to be careful in what we say about GPL-related copyright violations too.. especially as this is even further removed from "theft" than what people do when they download music or movies.