Sothink Violated the FlashGot GPL and Stole Code

ShineTheLight sends in news of two Firefox plug-ins: FlashGot, the original, and Sothink, the GPL-violating come-lately. "People at Sothink decided to violate the GPL by stealing a piece of core code from FlashGot and using it without even the decency of covering their tracks. It is an exact copy of a previous version of FlashGot. This deception came to light when users reported to the FlashGot support forum that their software was not working right. Some digging led to the discovery that the older module that Sothink stole and used verbatim was overriding the more recent engine on the machines of those who had both installed and it was causing the issue. It has been reported to AMO and the FlashGot developer is aware of it. The Sothink people have completely ignored and been silent on the subject. This is why most good programmers will stop contributing to the global community because there are those who will steal their work, pass it off as their own, never acknowledge or give credit, and then shamefully stick their head in the sand and ignore the consequences." The three most recent reviews of Sothink point out this plug-in's dishonest nature. A number of earlier, one-line, 5-star reviews — expressed in a similar style — sound suspiciously like astroturfing.

Comments

Illegal Copyleft Infringement.

[Ostracus]

"People at Sothink decided to violate the GPL by stealing a piece of core code from FlashGot and using it without even the decency of covering their tracks."

Stealing? A digital artifact?

Re:Proof of that Statement?

[dstar]

That's funny. From my personal experience, most of the really good programmers that I know _do_ contribute to open source. That's how they got to be really good programmers, in fact. They had the chance to do things right, rather than being pushed to meet some arbitrary marketing deadline, or simply being too busy fighting fires to spend time improving their skill.

At $employer[-1], we had a suite of software which put any commercial SRM suite to shame (not just my opinion -- we evaluated all the ones we could find, as we were being pushed to use a vendor-supported system), but it could have been much better if we'd had time to go in and clean up parts of it that had been written over a decade ago. On the open-source stuff I write, I don't _have_ that problem. I can do it right. (I also have that luxury at my current job, at least so far, which is _really_ nice.)

If all you're doing is writing the same sort of code the same way, you aren't going to improve your skills, at least not in a reasonable timeframe. You have to stretch yourself, _and_ you have to be exposed to better (or at least different) practices. You have to have people pointing out not just where you've done things wrong, but where you could have done them better, and even -- no, especially -- where you could have done things 'better', even though 'better' is a matter of opinion and theirs differs; having to defend _why_ you think your opinion is right makes you think about it. It certainly does me, anyway. Heck, sometimes I even change my mind!

I've found that the best way to get that sort of exposure and criticism is by contributing to open source software. At work, I'm being paid to get things done, not to sit and argue the merits of one approach over another if either is 'good enough'; a little of that is reasonable, because it helps make sure they _are_ both 'good enough', but at the end of the day, I'm being paid to produce, not study. I'm being paid to write software to get things done, in a manner that other people on the team can maintain, not learn Erlang or Haskell to broaden my understanding of programming.

And I think that's perfectly reasonable. Improving my programming skill benefits _me_ primarily, and my employer secondarily, just as exercise benefits me primarily (by improving my health) and my employer secondarily (by reducing the number of days missed to illness). They don't pay me to exercise, and they don't pay me to improve my programming skill. They pay me to get things done.

Re:heh, there web page looks like a parked domain

[unlametheweak]

Why would you even download this? Their web page and blog looks like it was created from an SEO program for selling viagra.

And I noticed all of the 5-star reviews I've read are all in broken English. All of the 1-Star negative reviews are in perfect English. It's only a correlation, but it (the positive reviews) is an indicator of spam.

Lock and load, lawyers

[Qubit]

Fifty comments in this thread and no one has mentioned the Software Freedom Law Center? Amateurs!

The lead developer for FlashGot needs to contact the SFLC. Right. Now. The SFLC has lawyers on staff who eat companies like this for breakfast. Or at least, you know, they'll give them a very stern talking-to.

He shouldn't contact the supposed violators (that could cause legal murkiness), he should not go fishing around for evidence of the violation (again, more lawyerly problems), he should not pass Go, and in no way shape or form should he try to collect $200 from anyone.

Once he talks to the lawyers then he'll know what steps he should take to document the violation and then to approach the violators. By putting his ducks in a row first and by communicating with a lawyer, he'll have a much easier time approaching the Sothink company and getting the violation resolved.

Pro tip: The last time I emailed the SFLC it took 13 days for them to respond, so in order to get the ball rolling on resolving this problem I'd suggest picking up the phone and calling them.

Re:Proof of that Statement?

[Dogtanian]

But when he is ignoring me for too long, acting stubborn, or just being an asshole, I will kick his ass. Hard.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I then have no problem with suing him, driving over there and storming the building,

Storming the building? Seriously?!

(Let's be honest... no.)

or DDOSing his servers, if I have fair proof that what he did was illegal/wrong.

Make up your mind. Are you going the legal route, the Hollywood fantasy "opening a can of whupass" that'll (at best) land you in the shit in real life and solve nothing route or the Internet geek vigilante route?

FWIW... this sort of thing is a PITA, as the legal route (#1) isn't always practical for jurisdictional and financial reasons, and the thieving, weasellish pricks might get away with it if relying on that alone. But suggesting #2 is just downright silly and makes you look like an ITG.

#3 has a lot of problems, mainly related to vigilantism in general. But yeah, I appreciate why people might be tempted to go down that route if legal recourse wasn't practical.

Anyway, you're right that people shouldn't cave in in the face of bullshit like this, but you're not doing yourself any favours with the ITG nonsense.

Re:Oh Slashdot...

[Dogtanian]

Problem is, you really can't make money by making software and hiding it from everyone.

Well... I thought that was what I was discussing. Obviously you can't make money by selling the application directly, but you can grant access to the service or sit on it and exploit the fact that you have a *tool* (i.e. a means to an end) that no-one else has.

And "carrying out a service on behalf of others"? Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean someone would write a program, hide it from everyone, but offer to run the software for them on their behalf?

I wouldn't put it like that. If (say) Pixar were the only people who had halfway-decent 3D software that no-one else did- or had the prospect of developing in the forseeable future- then they could either exploit that to make their own animations miles better than anyone else's.

Or (in response to your question), they could provide services on others' behalf. That might be the form of them finding out what the client wants and doing pretty much all the work themselves; models, rendering, characters, design etc. Or at the other extreme they might provide a rendering service.

As I acknowledged, this wouldn't work in all cases; it certainly wouldn't work for a web browser, as you implied.

I would hope in a hypothetical copyrightless future, good people would create free software alternatives to software-as-service.

Quite possibly. Nothing I said would contradict that; it was a rebuttal of one specific assertion you made- paraphrasing- that in a copyright-free world there could *never* be any benefit in not giving one's software away. Which- IMHO- is wrong as a blanket statement, and flawed as an argument against copyright in general. But in some circumstances it could still be beneficial to do so, and- as you said- some altruistic people might release their work freely anyway- nothing stopping that.