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Pirated App Sold On Mac App Store
iDuck writes "When Wolfire Games released their animal martial arts game, Lugaru HD, on the Mac App store, they could be forgiven for thinking they were seeing double. A counterfeit version of the software is currently available on the app store at a much lower price point under the name Lugaru. The best bit: as yet Apple have not responded to Wolfire's emails to rectify the situation. While the source to the game was GPLed, 'the license made it very clear that the authors retained all rights to the assets, characters, and everything else aside from the code itself.'"
The real issue in this is how this will affect the public opinion on free software. It will not be good.
The public won't notice. As usual.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
No, it's perfectly kosher to have GPLed source code but non-GPLed game data.
See the various Quake GPL releases - it has NEVER been legal to use that GPL code to play the original game unless you legitimately owned the data.
It took quite a while before "standalone" games were created based on the Quake1/2/3 GPL release code, in these cases ALL of the game data was replaced with new (typically Creative Commons-licensed) data.
I don't think anyone would have an issue here if the Lugaru HD engine were being used with all-new artwork. The problem here is that the Lugaru HD artwork/data is being re-released by the pirates at a much lower price, and Apple is supporting this piracy by not responding to the emails from the owner of the original artwork/data.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've seen too many stupid comments about this today and yesterday, so I'm going to clarify a few points:
1. The SOURCE CODE to the EXECUTABLE was released as GPL.
2. GPL DOES, in fact, allow you to sell your build of that executable.
3. While they did distribute the assets (textures, models, sound, etc.) with the source code, those assets WERE NOT distributed via GPL.
4. GPL is for source code, not assets. For that, you're looking at a creative commons type license for something similar.
5. The assets were distributed with a "you can do anything BUT SELL IT" license
Meaning, as they charge $2.00 for it, Lugaru (non HD) is in blatant copyright violation. Never mind, using the name is probably a blatant trademark violation.
I think a lot of games (especially indie type titles) could benefit from going open source, while keeping tight hold on their assets. Sell the textures, models, and sounds, and give the source away. If someone wants to "steal" your game, they're going to have to build the rest themselves from scratch. It would help both in keeping tiny titles like that away from falling into the abandonware pit (especially if it's incompatible with modern OS's), and helping aspiring game devs in understanding how game logic works.
Thats not a malformed URL, its a perfectly valid one - the trailing dot makes the domain a fully qualified one under RFC 1738. Its your filter program that is the faulty one here.
You should submit this info to the makers of Dan's Guardian so they can fix their software to handle all properly formed URLs.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
No, he didn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law