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Trying To Lure Suckers, Company Resells Open Source Blender
sylphsama writes "A company named 'IllusionMage" deceptively resells a 3D open source animation package (Blender) and claims it as their own. The software, dubbed IllusionMage, portrays flagrant similarities with Blender, although outdated compared to the original. The website itself is a patchwork of sorts, using renders from different users and numerous other packages as a way to impress its visitors. Not only is that a breach of copyright, but they intentionally hide that the software is distributed under the GNU GPL license, rendering it free to use. The Blender Foundation itself has spoken out through its chairman Ton Roosendaal." I love that they promise "Free Updates For Life. All From the Thriving Open Source Community, This Software is Forever Improving."
What he's doing is completely legal. Quite how much money he makes would be interesting to see, anyone buying a 3d package would surely do a small amount of research. Law of averages will prevail I suppose.
He's been doing this for ages, and does it with various other software packages.
At the bottom of the page it clearly says:
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I knew it wasn't Blender because the commercial said it was "easy".
Now this isn't to say that it's wrong to sell GPL software - even RMS and the GPL v3 licenses say that you can sell it for whatever you can get for it - but that anyone else is free to do the same with the copy you sell them, so the price quickly drops to zero.
They're doing the "sucker born every minute" thing.
Same, nearly identical, treatment for flightprosim.com knock off of flightgear.org. Shame....
Essentially what they are selling is the training video, the software is included as a "service" and like you said they do say that it's open source, though a bit sheepishly of course. Just someone looking for something to get outraged about, nothing to see here.
Monstar L
Want to create Pixar and Dreamworks In 2 Hours or Less? Easy! just ripp off this already free software, then ripp off some illegal Pixar models on the net and you are set! BEAUTIFUL Animations With Minimum Effort...
There's no way to make a decent animation in two hours, unless your movie is based on a bouncing ball in a squared box, heck even that would take more than two hours in blender, Producing 3D Animations & Graphics Ha[s] Never Been THIS EASY
Ugh. No. The trailing dot is perfectly correct and it should be there. It's actually a hack that the trailing dot is implicitly assumed in domain names.
"It's a little-known fact, but fully-qualified (unambiguous) DNS domain names have a dot at the end."
http://www.dns-sd.org/TrailingDotsInDomainNames.html
...which has a grammatical error in it's explanation...
BZZZZT Game over, thanks for playing. ;-)
-=Maggie Leber=-
Any browser (or other DNS-using software) that does not accept a terminal period on a domain name is broken. The root of the DNS is ., and this domain could just as well be written as "news.slashdot.org.". In fact, using a terminal . may speed up access if anything because it prevents the use of any "search" statements in /etc/resolv.conf.
You missed the bit where the software is being promoted using copyrighted artwork.
Legit or not, you gotta love the layout of that website. Someone should make a wordpress theme called "scam" that looks like that...
...which has a grammatical error in it's explanation...
BZZZZT Game over, thanks for playing. ;-)
The "apostrophe - s" there shows possession. If the explanation belonged to John, we would say "John's explanation". Here I was using the informal "it" to refer to the company or product, hence "it's explanation" as the explanation belonged to it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
BZZZZT - ok so you've thought about it but you're still wrong.
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Apostrophe
Be aware of the its/it's trap. Use an apostrophe with the word "it" only when you want to indicate a contraction for "it is" or "it has." It is a pronoun, and pronouns have their own possessive form that does not use an apostrophe. For example, "That noise? It's just the dog eating its bone."
...which has a grammatical error in it's explanation...
BZZZZT Game over, thanks for playing. ;-)
The "apostrophe - s" there shows possession. If the explanation belonged to John, we would say "John's explanation". Here I was using the informal "it" to refer to the company or product, hence "it's explanation" as the explanation belonged to it.
Wrong.
It's is a contraction for it is or it has. Its is a possessive pronoun meaning, more or less, of it or belonging to it.
This part is awesome:
Your Dinky One-Time Investment Is Only $47!
(This is a special launch offer only, we're only opening this for the next 3 days only before the offer closes forever!)
Thats right. Your investment for the entire course is only $47 (this launch offer will closed anytime after February 26, 2011 )
Where February 26, 2011 is: // How many days to add to today // Add 10 days
days = 3;
d = new Date();
now = d.getTime();
d.setTime(now + days * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
document.getElementById("offerEnd1").innerHTML = formatDate(d);
function formatDate(d) {
var months = new Array("January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December");
return months[d.getMonth()] + " " + d.getDate() + ", " + d.getFullYear();;
Nope, sorry. The rule to remember is "Possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes." So: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs
Actually the problem isn't with browsers, but rather some Web servers that see a difference between "example.com" and "example.com." IIS is one of them, which makes the "issue" quite visible.