(Last edited March 4, 2008)
I can’t believe that there are people out there who will blatantly steal someone else’s work that was freely available and turn around claim it as his own, charging for it. Obviously, 995 SOFT aka Filao does it, (I’ve discussed it in this posting) and I’m sure there are others that I haven’t heard of yet.
The newest one is S4BB Ltd, who sells Metasoft’s free PDF viewer as his own, at a hefty price of $49.99. More info on this here. The worst thing about it is that it seems Palmgear and Handango isn’t doing much about it (I guess they could get some potential revenue from it). And S4BB Ltd pretty much copies even the screenshot of Metasoft’s PDF viewer straight from the website!
It bothers me when these things happen, when developers write up a free open source program and someone decides to take advantage of this and sell it as his own.
I’d strongly suggest checking out a program fully and doing research on it before paying the money as you may find out that the money you paid didn’t go to the developer.
So be careful, and wary when paying for software that doesn’t provide a trial version.
Again, keep in mind that I am only voicing my personal opinion about this and it seems that many of you will and do feel differently.
: archives categories palm misc editorial connectioncentral
Well, the GPL allows that. People should think about before writing such nonsense. They should even think a bit more before publishing a program’s source under the GPL. That’s why it is called “free software”!
In the meaning of freedom to do what ever you want. Isn’t it that what you pretend to defend?
Interesting perspective.
I am writing purely on a moral and conscience perspective rather on the GPL terms and the legal aspects.
What I am saying is that it’s unfair to the programmer and developer of a program who is offering it free to find out that someone else is benefitting from your work and charging for it.
If this happens more often to very useful programs, I doubt that the Palm community will find many free software available anymore, which would be a shame.
Here’s a very interesting discussion on this at 1src, which looks like you, (funkym) has contributed to and added your thoughts.
It looks like the matter has been resolved anyway.