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CherryOS Goes Open Source
netsniper writes "The CherryOS website now acknowledges a forthcoming alliance with Open Source Software! After going 'on hold' recently, a re-release of CherryOS is purported to be coming in May according to the site. This is great news on the surface, but let's see how it pans out. This move is probably a result of the many reviews of their product that set out to prove it was bogus."
..that they are popping their Cherry?
Heh, first time I tried to load this story I got "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along." I can't help but wonder if the CherryOS people might make a similar statement in May when they're supposed to open the source.
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
Oh please. Can this whole shenanigan just end already? By now, it's already been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that CherryOS is a repackaged version of PearPC (google for "spiro multimax 3000"). Arben and MXS are using absolutely any tactic to get attention. He must have a serious ego problem.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
It's easy. All they had to do in order to avoid all the bad press is to start out with it being Open Source. The GPL states that you can charge for a product, or do whatever you like with it, just as long as your provide the source code. And if you use source code from another project (PearPC), then you have to acknowledge it.
It was so simple and easy, I don't know why they didn't Open Source Cherry OS from the begining.
If your friend lies to you, and then comes clean... you maybe forgive them, but you never really respect them all that much, because you know they can lie to your face.
CherryOS will never look that cool to any of us, because they only came clean because of being caught in a lie.
s/demand/threats of legal action/
It would be funny if the OSS release proved that it wasn't a rip-off of PearPC. Unlikely, but funny.
It seems like this is all just a delay tactic for CherryOS to get it's code in line. I'm surprised that they didn't stay on hold for a while longer to gain more time. As far as the "Due to Overwhelming Demand," that's ridiculous. The entire OSS community has been up in arms about their crap. This is just them trying not to get sued, although it would be hilarious if they were actually legit... no comments there
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
I'm confused, PearPC is already open source...
*scratches head*
Oh well, I guess they finally realized, if you can't beat them, join them.
This whole CherryOS thing has been completely stupid. Why do people think they can slap a different name on something and sell it, when it's already free?
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
Does this mean that CherryOS has already lost their license to use the source code from PearPC?
The developer of the Altivec emulation (the one who was collecting money for a lawsuit) has already revoked their rights to his code. Even if they try to open source they still have problems as they are now dealing with copyrighted code.
I for one wish to thank CherryOS developers for being so generous to give the fruits of their so hard work to the community.
This move is probably a result of the many reviews of their product that set out to prove it was bogus.
1. Say Windows XP/Longhorn is bogus
2. Wait for them to release it as Open Source
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
They're only admitting it now.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Can they just open source their "project" now? Is it not too late? Hasn't several developers permanantly revoked the GPL license from CherryOS so they can never use their code?
In today's other top stories, Fox News just went liberal, and hired Al Gore as their director of programming. Michael Moore also decided to become a warblogger, and said he was wrong about everything he said about the Bush administration.
... and then they built the supercollider.
YES!
I can finally breathe again!
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
Hope this goes better than Cherry Coke.
Underholdning.info
It smells more like a half-assed effort to calm down legal threats than anything.
The moment you see their words "popular demand" you know they're STILL trying to lie and get away with something.
I bet you that their Open Source project will just be a part of CherryOS and not the whole application.
Ìt will ressemvle at a simple SDK so that software developers could somehow use some part of CherryOS.
If CherryOS was really programmed by XMS (Which I REALLY doubt), then a company would never just abandon a project like that. You don't abandon a program that you've used a lot of time and money to program.
Time will tell...
Time will tell...
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
You're too late. April 1st was ages ago.....
Philip
Signatures are broken
You do not lose any rights by selling this...this is allowed, you lose rights by not making the source to GPL software available.
Notice how they can abbreviate that to
Cherry O. S. Project
and thence to
Cherry OS Project
and thence to
CherryOS Project
and finally
CherryOS.
I gotta respect them -- they're not just a _bit_ slimy, they are slimier than Fungus the Bogeyman in a barrel of natto!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
No, I'm New Here
How can you steal it. They only copied and modified the source, no theft here.
Move along, the parent is nothing but a TROLL!
Can Cherry OS put that on their website? Because they've alledgedly packaged up GPL software and sold it as their own closed source software, would the FSF allow them to use one of their trademarks?
I am surprised by this behavior and chalk it up to what appears to me to be blatant disregard for GPL and the law.
It is not legitimate. By violating the GPL previously, they lost their rights under the GPL. Now they have no right to use the PearPC code unless the owners of that code explicitly give them permission. If they continue, even if they open source it, they are guilty of copyright violation.
What do you suppose the odds of that happening are?
Right. I'm an American with a logical mind and I've never understood why people in the U.S. use mm.dd.yyyy...makes no sense. Either yyyy.mm.dd or dd.mm.yyyy, please!
BenCurry.net
Yeah, middle-endian sucks... Let's hope they don't start using this in cpu's :)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
They didn't steal it. They acquired it legally, they even modified it legally. Just the distribution was illegal. Not because they distributed it, but because that distribution was not under the terms of the GPL.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
RTFL:
"4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
I guess the threat of legal action can be pretty "overwhelming."
Of course, they've already lost their rights to distribute under the GPL (once you've violated the GPL, you lose all distibution rights, even if you come clean), so the PearPC folks could still legally enjoin them from distributing even in open source form.
Assume the project starts up and hires some fly-by-night guy to design and build this system. He promises he can do it in four months for X amount of money.
This guy tries like hell to build the project, but gets stymied by some stuff. So he downloads PearPC and tries to figure out what he's doing wrong.
Eventually, he figures out that what he did wrong was promise something that nobody could deliver, so he panics and starts mucking around in PearPC to conceal its origin.
When the deadline hits, he sends them his "obfuscated" version of PearPC and collects his check. He runs off into the night hoping nobody ever finds out.
Meanwhile, the completely innocent company puts this project up for sale. The open source community raises hell. The company goes "OMG! WTF?" and yanks it off the market.
After some examination, the company decides that the only possible way to recover from this (according to their lawyers) is to GPL the project. Since it qualifies as a work made for hire, they own all the rights to the non-PearPC code, so they can license *that* however they like.
Just playing devil's advocate. Maybe the big bad company isn't the villain here; maybe it's just one crappy little ass-hat developer.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
It's merely a question of enforcement. Your license to the software under the GPL is terminated when you violate this term, so any further use that would require a license is now copyright infringement instead of licensed use. The question is whether you are going to get sued for the copyright infringement.
They can't realese it under GPL because when they first violated it they lost all their rights to use it. See paragraph 4 of the GNU GPL.
I tried PearPC when it first started making headlines. Or at least when I first started reading headlines about it. Anyway, it's setup was somewhat cumbersome and I abondoned the attempt before finishing. From what I've heard from those that have reviewed CherryOS to prove that it was really PearPC is that the only original code seems to be the installer. That CherryOS made the installation of PearPC incredibly easier. My opinion is that they should release that (the installer).
The creators of PearPC have withdrawn MXS' right to use their code (The GPL allows for this, apparently), due to prior illegal use thereof..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
RTFL
I have. But have you heard of a small legal principle called 'due process'? Once you've legally established that 4 has been violated, the license is revoked. It said so in the next sentence. Your claim that the license has been violated is not a conviction.
Otherwise IBM would have had to stop shipping AIX long ago based on SCOs claim that the license is revoked. See the difference? If you want to terminate their license, you must prove (a preponderance of evidence) that there are grounds for termination.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The company site has removed CherryOS from their product listings.
http://www.mxsinc.com/
It's only an insult if it's not true.
I'm a technical editor for EDN Magazine, and am scheduled to be in Maui on vacation in early May. While I'm there, I've scheduled (several weeks ago) an onsite interview with Maui X-Stream, the promoters of CherryOS. Yesterday morning I got an email from company president Jim Kartes clarifying Slashdot's earlier heads-up that the software had been pulled, and yesterday's CherryOS website revision; "Due to Overwhelming Demand, Cherry Open Source Project Launches 5.1.2005".
Here's what Jim says: "Brian. Here's the deal. We have decided to change CherryOS to an "open source code" product. We will do so May 1st because we need a few weeks to prepare for this. We will be charging only $14.95 for this to cover our cost of development, plus ongoing development as well as marketing costs. We are doing this because we want all to see that we have not lifted source code from other sources."
I suspect that the PearPC development team, and many of the rest of you, have lots of questions for the folks at Maui X-Stream. Please visit my blog posting at EDN's website and suggest general topics for discussion during my interview, along with specific questions that you want me to ask Jim and other company representatives I meet with. I'll report back to Slashdot after the meeting, both here and on my blog.
That brings up an interesting point, actually. The website talks about it being an open source project, and they use the GNU logo on the page. From this, people can reasonably assume that it'd be GPL. But I don't think it actually says anywhere that it'd actually be GPL. They could have another trick up their sleeve
Obviously, as PearPC is GPL, legally CherryOS would have to be GPL, so I could be on an entirely wrong track here, but is there a form of open source license that prohibits forking?
This dude should have kept a low profile from the start. He has been ripping of OSS Projects for years. CherryOS is only his latest victim. MXS has already pulled PDF Creator after it was shown to be a total ripoff of opensource, and their "flagship product" the VX30 java/web/video/whatever thing rips code from the following projects according to an analasys by 'eventhorizon' on the pearpc.net boards. These packages were all found by examining text strings, so there likely could be many more libraries, etc. that the strings have been stripped from.
:)
XviD
MplayerC (windows gui frontend)
FileDropListCtrl (no credit was given)
DEFLATE code
Inflate code
JOrbis
LAME
Arben et al are lately trying to hide the stolen code by packing the executables via UPX or some similar or slightly modified PE compressor, so the analasys is being done on memory dumps of the binaries after decompression.
Their VX30 products are priced from $1,000 up. Oddly enough, the VX30 product actually seems to work pretty well. At least in this particular case, it's a shame that with little more effort and perhaps the choice of a couple different libraries and methods of writing their application that could have legally produced and sold this product... at least until people find more stolen code in it
great, lets set out to prove windows is bogus next,
then MS will be FORCED to release source code.
riiiight?
For those that don't remember (from Nmap 3.50 Press Release - 2004-02-20):
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
The only "due process" that exists is before a jury, and that is after they've been hauled into court for copyright violation. The first time the GPL goes into action is before the judge, and it goes like this (courtesy of Eben Moglen):
EM: Your Honor, these people are distributing our copyrighted software. Please make them stop.
GPLViolator: We invoke the GPL as a defense.
EM: Your Honor, according to clause 4, when they violated the GPL here here and here, it was revoked and void, therefore they cannot use the GPL as a defense.
GV: (I'm screwed...) Let's settle.
To date, no one has gone beyond the "let's settle" stage. The only way they could do that would be to deny they violated the GPL and request a jury to make a decision. Good luck convincing a judge of that.
-Hope
" If you're reading this, anyone at MXS, I have been far more than fair. I have so far only ever asked you to comply with the GPL, and release your source code. But now you've pissed me off. Being that I need now contact a lawyer, I will not stop simply there. Being that I'm full copyright owner of my code, and can do as I please, including providing overriding licenses to those openly available.
Since I view Maui X-Stream as in breach of the GPL under which my code is distributed, let this serve as public notice, that my code is no longer legally available for any reason to Maui X-Stream. Since they refuse to co-operate with the very lenient guidelines of the GPL, and refuse at all ends to comply with it. They can no longer claim any rights under the GPL license concerning my code. As such, my original rights of copyright apply, and I refuse any legal access to Maui X-Stream to my code (my code being specifically the G4/AltiVec emulation in generic, and in specific to x86 scalar, and SSE as implemented as a modification to the PearPC project)"
Text copied from here
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The hat icon is redhat-main-menu.png, and belongs to the redhat-artwork RPM ... License: GPL
GNU General Public License is a license under copyright law. It is not a license under trademark law. Red Hat claims exclusive rights in the "shadow man" logo under trademark law, not copyright law.
but is there a form of open source license that prohibits forking?
Prohibiting forking is against the spirit of the GPL. Part of the beauty of open source is that you CAN fork a project to give it your unique features... but you have to allow access to your changes to GPL code to the original author, so they can incoroporate them if they like them. Sometimes what begins as a fork overtakes the original project. This is what makes open source projects greater than the individual that started them. I for one, would not contribute to an "open source" project that prohibited forking. The owner/maintainer could just stop development and the project would be dead, nullifying your contributions.