Maui X-Stream at it Again?

Goyuix writes "In their latest commercial venture, Maui X-Stream, the now infamous company behind Cherry OS, has recently launched a suite of tools that once again takes advantage of GPL'd code to get their dirty work done... This time it is a set of video encoding, streaming and display tools. A choice quote from SourceForge: 'There are boundled dshow filters, string, toolbars, dialogs, command line switches, etc..., which can be verified easily by just running the applications and taking a look, or a bit harder by analysing the memory dump'. Is the situation getting worse or is community just getting better at finding the violators?"

Comments

Not Better, Just Smarter

[gbulmash]

Is the situation getting worse or is community just getting better at finding the violators?

I don't think it's the community getting better, at least not in this case. If you have a crook who is known to steal televisions and then put them in his front yard, disguised as birdbaths, you're going to get suspicious every time a new birdbath appears in his yard.

Maui X-Stream is that crook and this video project is their latest birdbath.

- Greg

Re:Not Better, Just Smarter

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a copyright violation. They're violating the GPL. And it's a big deal because if the authors had wanted any business to take their code, modify it, and release a binary only product with it they would have originally used the BSD license.

Re:Not Better, Just Smarter

[Directrix1]

Open source implementations which are compatible with formats used by proprietary vendors are not proprietary software. Additionally, we would be nowhere without reverse engineering and the open sharing of knowledge. And that "we" includes proprietary software companies like Microsoft.

Re:Not Better, Just Smarter

[sjames]

I don't understand why the community has a problem with this in the first place. The original source code is still under the GNU license.

The same reason plagerism is one of the more serious offenses you can commit in the acedemic world for a start.

There's also the extra offensive nature that having been offered a very generous license for your hard work, these jackasses STILL choose to misapropriate it.

Re:Not Better, Just Smarter

[fireman sam]

Actually downloading music is different to what Maui X-Stream is doing.

The equivilant would be if I downloaded the latest Britney Spears album, printed new covers and labels and then attempted to sell it as my own works.

Nobody who downloads songs on P2P is claiming they now own the copyright to the piece of music and are attempting to sell it as their own work.

Maui X-Stream have downloaded PearPC, printed new covers and labels and were attempting to sell it as their own work. Exactly what they are doing now.

Getting worse?

[Drakonian]

It's hard to say it's getting worse since it's only one company that keeps blatantly offending.

I may be a bit late to the party here -

[thewldisntenuff]

But is the problem that they aren't properly stating who the source code belongs to? I mean, I thought code-copy was okay in the GPL so long as you noted the GPL warning and who the code came from.....For example, I can repackage an OS and sell it with my own support, etc (a la CentOS -> RedHat), so long as I make such statments, right?

I really don't know - so it'd help if someone would explain it instead of modding me (-1, stupid)

Thanks

-thewldisntenuff

Re:I may be a bit late to the party here -

[slamb]

I can sell compiled binaries of grep for a billion dollars each if I can find someone willing to pay that for them.

But of course you can't find someone willing to pay. The GPL permits you to sell software, but it also permits any of your customers to undercut you by selling it for a lower price or just giving it away. So if you write some GPLed software, you can probably sell it once. If someone else wrote it, you probably can't sell it at all.

So there are two realistic ways to make money off GPLed software:

• Do custom development for a fee. Like a consulting business that develops niche software that probably only one company would ever use. They have more options in case you become unreasonable or go bankrupt, so presumably they'd be willing to pay more than for a proprietary solution.
• Sell an aggregation (like Red Hat Enterprise Linux), documentation, or support. This is what those companies you mentioned - RedHat, SuSE, Lindows, etc. - do.

These are valid ways to make a living, but they'll never be as lucrative as Microsoft's business model. Namely, to write the software once, sell it over and over, and sell the extras separately.

Well...

[Effugas]

To be clear -- using dshow filters, piped executables, and so on is fine by GPL; you're just not allowed to link the code into your application. It looks like they modified the GUI tools, though, without releasing source. That's not allowed.

Re:How Is This Particular Instance

[LnxAddct]

Err Red Hat has always provided full source to everything and has never tried to hide the fact that it uses GPL code. In fact it thrives on it, Red Hat produces more open code then any other entity. This includes gnome.org, the kernel, apache, gcj, and most other major open source projects are maintained mostly on Red Hat's payroll. Linus never seemed to have an issue with anything they did, he did afterall take something 10 million dollars worth of stock that they gave him for free just for his contributions. Some major open source folks work at Red Hat, everything from top kernel maintainers, to the guy who wrote the first gcc c++ compiler. People very rarely appreciate what Red Hat has done for the community.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Worse

[Zenmonkeycat]

The problem is that many businesses see OSS advocates as "Dirty Pinko Commies" who just want to make everything free while they smoke their drugs and have promiscuous sexual relations. These "communists" don't believe in personal property, and aren't apt to be consumers in a capitalist society. Therefore, capitalists can abuse them and steal from them, and they can't do anything but whine and complain to Comrade Khrushchev.

I realize that sounds silly, considering the fall of the Berlin Wall and Gorbachev's early retirement, but the whole "gotta fight the commies" mentality really hasn't died in the US. There's still that vast chimera of Global Communism, and for some, the best way to fight it is to steal from the communists and make money selling things.

Once we can disabuse these klepto-capitalists of their skewed ideas of OSS advocates, and prove to them that we actually have the money and initiative to litigate the pants off of them, they'll shut up and stop stealing from us.

Personally, I'm apt to blame the whole thing on Spiro Agnew. But that's just me.

Re:i called maui x stream

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironicly, coming from a corporation, that was refreshingly frank.

Re:Acquisition

[don.g]

It means that the app *may* *technically* be in compliance with the GPL (but they're scum for doing it like that). Essentially, they will have an executable with the GPL code, and then an executable with their code (and no GPLed stuff), and some way of communicating between the two. This means that they can get away with releasing only the source for the executable with the GPLed code in it, but it's not terribly useful by itself. The Mac OS X IM client Proetus does this, using GAIM's networking code.

Is it GPL compliant? Maybe; the MySQL guys seem to think that talking to their database over the network amounts to "linking", where as most people traditionally have taken this to mean "merging their code with mine in the same executable".

Is it scummy behaviour that should be discouraged? Absolutely.

Re:i called maui x stream

[northcat]

That's a pretty outrageous claim you're making. How can we know it's true?

(Yeah yeah, I know, I'm captain obvious)

You're reading the GPL out of context

[Anonymous Coward]

so you could claim that you're charging $200 for the transferrance, but I don't know how well it would hold up in court.

You are wrong. The section of the GPL that you are referring to is discussing the source code that you must provide. While you are required to give the source code to all requesters if you distribute the binary at all, you are allowed to charge a nominal fee to cover your costs of the source distribution (i.e. cost of media and mailing, though a few nasty folks have taken to violating this chunk of the GPL, trying to charge $60 or so for source to the software involved).

You can charge *whatever you want* for the binary. You can charge a million dollars for the binary, if you want -- but if you distribute that binary at all (including selling it), you *must* also provide GPLed, redistributable source with it (actually, there are some minor variants, like allowing giving a reference a download to the source in some cases, or an offer to provide the source for a nominal fee, but this pretty well sums it up). You must allow the party requesting the source to redistribute it under the GPL.

So you can certainly sell GPLed software. Red Hat does it every day. What Red Hat cannot do is prevent people from replicating their distribution. (Red Hat actually is extremely nice about this, since they could legally be assholes like SuSE and make their installers non-GPL -- instead, they freely provide downloadable ISOs of their distribution. In return, they get more community respect than SuSE does.)

Re:Acquisition

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the MySQL guys qualify as kind of scummy too for trying to convince people to probably buy unnecessary licenses.

Everyone's just out to make a buck. :-(

Maui X-Stream is probably committing fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

If companies are knowingly selling software which they have no right to sell (because they are not complying with the GPL), they are committing the crime of fraud, and people at the company can go to jail.

Now, granted, I'm not sure whether a DA would care about some open source project enough to prosecute without a lot of complaints (prosecute the mugger or some guy ripping off a bunch of people who are giving their software away for "free" anyway -- easy choice), but I would assume that it doesn't require tons of money and lawyers on your part.

It's Free Software, not Open Source

[CarpetShark]

The GPL is about Free Software, not open source. I don't mean to whine pointlessly, but it's an important distinction. Open Source folk wouldn't like it if you called their work "shareware", so please try to use the correct terminology.

Re:Acquisition

[Tim C]

The MySQL guys are wrong. Imagine Apache was GPLed rather than Apache licenced - following th MySQL guys' reasoning, all web browsers that access an Apache-hosted site would have to be GPLed.