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Beware of "Backspaceware"
SubLevel writes "Since conception in 2004, Paint.NET has been generously been offering the software community the taste of successful freeware, by allowing anyone to download and decipher the entire working of their extremely popular photo editing program. As posted in the Official Paint.NET blog by Rick Brewster, "Backspaceware" as he has so coined has become a tremendous issue. "Paint.NET's license is very generous, and I even release the source code. All free of charge. Unfortunately it gets taken advantage of every once in awhile by scum who are trying to profit from the work of others. I like to call this backspaceware*. They download the source code for something, load it up in to Visual Studio (or whatever), hit the backspace key over the software's name and credits, type in a new name and author, and re-release it. They send it to all the download mirror sites, and don't always do a good job covering up their tracks.""
I been have been good at proofreading.
to the solution to your problems.
The majority of copyright licenses used for popular free software applications require people who redistribute the software to preserve the original author's copyright notice. Failure to do so is plagiarism, and the license treats plagiarism as copyright infringement.
This is a good reason to implement obfuscated C for things like the program name and author.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
His "solution" to this seems to be to close the source for parts of the program, which is a major overreaction to this joker.
I don't think he should be worried - as long as his (the "genuine") program appears higher up in Google for the name and the important search terms, people will ignore the plagiarist.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I've seen this a number of times, shady people who only want to make a quick buck or have entirely unrealistic expectations of what software development costs or how it's done. At the root of this problem are either the shady people trying to make a quick buck, or the shady freelancers trying to meet the requirements on a non-existant budget.
Lets take the average scenario:
- Shady person sees a piece of software and thinks they can make some money if they made their own.
- Shady person has no programming knowledge, so posts on rentacoder or similar.
- Because they have no idea of what software development entails, or in order to make money it must cost next to nothing.
- Shady freelancer or outsourcing business wins the bid.
- Shady freelancer re-brands an existing piece of software in a day and the job's complete.
Quite a few times this is down to freelancers knowing they can just re-brand an existing open-source project, or even the shady business knowing they can get it cheap if freelancers do that.
Some times they get lucky and their "product" gets more success than the original project, but it's origins are now hidden and will be forever because you can't just come clean 6-12 months down the line when it's making money.
I've long called this pump and dump software, companies or individuals trying to build up a large portfolio of software under a common brand covering the widest market possible in the remote hope that they'll profit from some.
That isn't a feature of capitalism, it's a feature of human nature. Yes, it does mean you can't blindly trust a capitalist system from sorting everything out, but it is the very same principles which causes communist countries to go corrupt, and it is also why extreme liberalism will be taken advantage of by those who have the power/influence/money whatever to game the system.
Corruption isn't a matter of how governance is organised or how you set prices in your economy, it is a matter of transparency, openness and people being held responsible for their actions. If that does not apply it matters fuck all what economic system you use, you will just get different people screwing you over.
Now before people start suggesting direct democracy or some far-fetched ideal about having every company democratically controlled by the workers, you need to take into consideration that for democracy to work you need a transparent electoral system you can trust. Thus it still boils down to government transparency and people being slapped when they break the rules. There is no way around that.
As a freeware author, reputation is all you can expect to get in return for your work. It's bad enough that so many ad-laden download sites exist which make users jump through hoops to get the actual file or find a link to the homepage, all the while bombarding them with banners and popups. Never mind that the file is usually available from the well-sorted homepage without a hitch. But now some people even rip you off for the attribution. Quite frankly, be thankful for every piece of freeware that is still out there, because most authors wouldn't take that kind of shit if they got paid for it.
This is of course no different than what can be done with a hex editor on a binary. Somehow, being able to see the source code gives a lot of people the sense that they can do whatever they want with it. There has always been that mistaken notion that source code is the keys to the kingdom; for example, companies take great pains from letting their source code leak out, especially to their competitors. There are rarely secrets contained in source code (except for Microsoft's NSA backdoors), and if a competitor got it, more power to them wasting their time trying to reverse engineer it.
But there's something new contributing to this perception, which is the general disdain for copyrights these days. It's the record companies' fault, of course, for withholding sales of digital audio during the entire dot-com boom. Now they're struggling to sell singles for a fourth the price they were selling for 25 years ago, adjusting for inflation.
People think they have an entitlement to commercial music, and they think catching a glimpse of the source code gives them full rights.
WRONG! The MARKET solves ALL problems! Communist!
Better not give that prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor any ideas. They might try to put CentOS out of business.
Nah, it's worse (imho) than copyright infringement.
Most of us who casually infringe copyright don't delete the existing copyright notices and claim the stuff to be our own. These people do, making it plagiarism, which to me is copyright infringement compounded by *fraud*. I could care less about copyright infringement myself, but woe betide anyone who takes my work and calls it theirs!
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
He's entitled to statutory damages of something like $150,000 per copy. He hit the jackpot.
I spend a lot of time writing a PHP script for myself and decided to release it to the public. I think I threw a GPL notice on it but the source was included either way due to it being PHP. Well I put it up on my website and a few months later go back to update it. I search online and find someone selling it for $50. He refused to take it down when I asked him to which really added insult to injury. (He claimed he downloaded it from limewire therefore its fair game? wtf?) Considering he was actively advertised "his program" (mine with my name and stuff backspaced) he got a lot more people to download it then I did even though mine was free. I eventually got him to take it down by sending a cease and desist notice. (Thanks for the template RIAA)
I think rather than the problem be "I am not getting my due recognition and payment (if applicable)" is that someone else is taking all the time an effort of someone else which allows them to get the recognition and potentially payments if they incorporate a program they got for free and simply slap a $5 price tag on it.
Tell me about it. I post some really insightful comment in slashdot and somescum cut and paste it and post it as their own insight in other fora and blogs.
Certified that this comment is not a cut and paste of another poster's comment. Well, as far as I know. And I don't know much.
That's fraud: the "backspacer" is lying to every person who downloads the modified software from him (and probably infecting them with spyware too). Many Slashdot participants, like myself, believe that copying and redistribution should be legal with or without the author's permission, but that doesn't mean we approve of fraud. Sharing copies of Star Wars is not the same as telling everyone you're George Lucas.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Just have a project so obscure or specialised that no bugger's going to think its worthwhile nicking in the first place. Like mine for instance /sob.
Actually licensing is the way to go. True no license will stop someone stealing it, but it will give you the right to send 'cease and desist' notices to any site hosting the offending code. Its very hard to spread a usurped version of a program if reputable download locations won't host it.
This discussion makes me wonder if there is such a thing as "moral rights" in the US law. Let me explain : in France, the law gives you two sets of rights to protect your works. One is the "author rights" (droits d'auteur) and is the equivalent to US copyright law, ie, it expires some time after your death. The other set of rights is the "moral rights" (droits moraux), which are _inalienable_, and state that YOU are the sole author of the work and should be credited for it. So basically if you put your work in the public domain, and if someone distributes it and claims it as his own, under French law you can sue him. Is there such a protection in the US ?
The only scam here is the removal the copyright notices, not the profit. The Paint.NET guys gave permission for anyone in the world to make money selling their software. Legally, this is simple copyright infringement. Nothing new here.
Unfortunately it gets taken advantage of every once in awhile by scum who are trying to profit from the work of othersLooks like Rick Brewster doesn't understand the MIT license, under which Paint.NET is distributed. Besides it not being "freeware" as stated in TFA, the MIT license allows anyone to sell the software and re-brand it however they want (while preserving copyright notices). I believe there is a name for "scum" who do this: Red Hat.
Incidentally, this is exactly why SugarCRM left GPL v2 to move to a proprietary license called the Sugar Public License which had an attribution clause in it. The community gave Sugar mad shit because they weren't "true" open source, but low and behold GPL v3 included that type of protection and all the sudden Sugar is back within the good graces of "true" open source software.
You explain /exactly/ why my first stop for Windows "freeware" solutions is SourceForge, my second stop is Freshmeat, and my third is Google to look for an original author's site. Heck, I haven't even looked at Tucows in a couple of years. Problem solved. :)