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Hosting Company Appears To Be Violating the GPL [Resolved]
palegray.net writes "A web hosting provider called Appnor has recently moved the network diagnostics utility WinMTR off of SourceForge, and is now claiming the program to be a closed source, commercial application (it was previously made available under the GPL). I emailed the current maintainer of the original mtr utility about this, and have been informed that this event most likely constitutes an overt GPL violation, as it is presumed that WinMTR contains mtr code. Appnor claims that they have the right to do this, as there have been no external contributions to WinMTR in over ten years. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think copyright law works that way." Update: 01/10 18:24 GMT by KD : The CEO of Appnor, Dragos Manac, has posted a response, claiming that no GPL violation occurred, and promising to revert the code to GPLv2 by the end of the week.
Update: 01/11 14:01 GMT by KD : That was fast. WinMTR announced that the code is now available under the GPLv2.
Update: 01/11 14:01 GMT by KD : That was fast. WinMTR announced that the code is now available under the GPLv2.
No. It's a concept borrowed from real property. You know, that thing that idiots like you continue to try to conflate software with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Don't just take my word for it" followed by a Wikipedia link? Really?
Yeesh. Talk about missing the point.
You could have provided directly relevant links instead:
http://www.d2ca.org/is-abandonware-legal.html
http://www.classic-pc-games.com/disclaimer.php
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/369418/decompiling-and-redistributing-abandonware
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1001232/the-abandonware-dilemma
There. Now hopefully nobody else has to have wikipedia inflicted on them.
With Stackoverflow, you see all the listed opinions, rather than what some ass-hat with admin powers and no common sense decided should be the page content.
Provided it's been tweaked out recently and isn't buried under 3000+ edits worth of "history."
Provided you have any reason to suspect the page has been targeted (though ANY wikipedia page ought to raise that suspicion by default - even math pages have gone through crazy shit).
Provided that someone hasn't "archived off" the "discussion page" (something ass-hats with admin hats just love to do).
The problem with wikipedia is that fucking idiots with admin hats go around making the place worse every day.
i hacked together a bunch of other people's scripts, cut and paste'd a bunch of freebie code off the web, and stole a few functions out of some existing gpl'd applications. but hey, i haven't edited it in 10 years. does this mean i can sell it as commercial software? considering how crappie most commercial software is these days i think it would fit right in.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.