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Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#42Hey, author of ChatSecure here. Has anyone else experienced plagiarism of their open source software? This guy was almost insultingly lazy and didn't even bother to use a different logo or obfuscate the code.
Maybe you can get him for using the same logo, which you hopefully didn't set under bsd license
"Get him" just means taking it down, since he can hardly prove any damages. Then the guy can just take some other logo and put it up again.
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
As p4bl0 pointed out though, if your license isn't being violated then you have no claim here, they're obeying the law and your takedowns are not valid.
They are relicensing my software: Regular License - $13.99 The regular license allows the use of the purchased item in a project for either personal or commercial uses, without the payment of any further fees or charges after the initial download cost. The regular license gives you the right to use the purchased items within 1 project of your own or on behalf of a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). You or…
the whole point of the BSD (or any other permissive) license is that everyone is allowed to publish your code/binaries under a different license (including proprietary). if you want to prevent that from happening, you have to use a copyleft license (such as GPL). in this case there is nothing you can do, they are not violating the license, as long as their copy of the program still includes the original copyright notice (however, they don't have to give it to you so you can check).
the best you can do right now is learn from this and use a copyleft license for future releases of your program. that way everyone who distributes the program has to stick to the license you used and you can prevent it from being distributed as closed source.
here are a few copyleft licenses to consider: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.en.html
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#44I think you're missing an important lesson here: Your product is more valuable than you think. This guy wouldn't have started selling your thing is it wasn't clear that it's something that people will pay for. Your first reaction when you hear that he's making money off of it shouldn't be how to stop him. It should be "Wow. I could be making money off of this. My advice: - Don't worry about this guy. - Put a price on…
Would you trust proprietary software to encrypt your communications?
Absolutely. Time to start charging for it - you've got something here. Might as well pick the fruits of your labor.
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#45“I realize the BSD allows people to sell my binaries and source but I do not believe it authorizes them to sell the source under a different license.”
Er, that's the exact point of the BSD license. The GPL even allows selling binaries and source code, but not re-licensing.
So the gist of this blog post is that you offered your source code under a license that allows re-licensing provided that your copyright and some notices are included, someone did it, and now you realise you want the GPL. I applaud this person for taking advantage of the very point of BSD and making some business out of it, that chap is smart.
If he's using your logo and you didn't license the logo then that's a copyright claim. But you have no right to whine about the source code. He can say whatever he wants about it, that the "product" is his, etc. (You think Google Chrome doesn't use a hundred libraries written by someone else? But it's Google that made Chrome, right?) And in YOUR LICENSE you wrote “you cannot use my name to advertise”, so the only question is whether your copyright notice and license terms are included in the redistribution.
“… illegally selling licenses to my source code for $13.99-$59.99.”
I would be VERY careful about libeling people by publicly outing them as doing illegal activities. Alexander Moskalev may even have a case against you for defamation or libel. I'd take this blog down if I were you. And then go and read some pages from http://fsf.org/.
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#46I think you're missing an important lesson here: Your product is more valuable than you think. This guy wouldn't have started selling your thing is it wasn't clear that it's something that people will pay for. Your first reaction when you hear that he's making money off of it shouldn't be how to stop him. It should be "Wow. I could be making money off of this. My advice: - Don't worry about this guy. - Put a price on…
Would you trust proprietary software to encrypt your communications?
no way.
but, as i have pointed out, you could go copyleft instead.
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are relicensing my software: Regular License - $13.99 The regular license allows the use of the purchased item in a project for either personal or commercial uses, without the payment of any further fees or charges after the initial download cost. The regular license gives you the right to use the purchased items within 1 project of your own or on behalf of a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). You or…
And what part of that is incompatible with a BSD license?
I think (and actually, I hope too) that this isn't: "You cannot distribute Source Code". The BSD license may not force you to redistribute the source code, but I don't see it allowing you to forbid such a thing. Am I wrong?
EDIT: It seems I am, since if there was any changes to the product, it can be freely relicensed.
The safest way to protect against this is to use a better free software license which is copyleft (for instance the GNU GPL).
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#48I think you're missing an important lesson here: Your product is more valuable than you think. This guy wouldn't have started selling your thing is it wasn't clear that it's something that people will pay for. Your first reaction when you hear that he's making money off of it shouldn't be how to stop him. It should be "Wow. I could be making money off of this. My advice: - Don't worry about this guy. - Put a price on…
It depends on how many copies have been sold, and what the support costs are likely to be. If he's only sold two copies, then it's not going to be worth packaging it up.
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
As p4bl0 pointed out though, if your license isn't being violated then you have no claim here, they're obeying the law and your takedowns are not valid.
They are relicensing my software: Regular License - $13.99 The regular license allows the use of the purchased item in a project for either personal or commercial uses, without the payment of any further fees or charges after the initial download cost. The regular license gives you the right to use the purchased items within 1 project of your own or on behalf of a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). You or…
If he has modified even a single line of your source code, he is free to re-license the entire product as a whole under his own license. As long as your name / copyright notice is preserved in the source code / binary, there is nothing illegal about this. How else do you think GPL projects incorporate BSD-code ?
Re: Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure
#50I think you're missing an important lesson here: Your product is more valuable than you think. This guy wouldn't have started selling your thing is it wasn't clear that it's something that people will pay for. Your first reaction when you hear that he's making money off of it shouldn't be how to stop him. It should be "Wow. I could be making money off of this. My advice: - Don't worry about this guy. - Put a price on…
It depends on how many copies have been sold, and what the support costs are likely to be. If he's only sold two copies, then it's not going to be worth packaging it up.
Don't forget, it's already packaged up. It's in the app store already.
The author can spend the next ten minutes logging into his apple account and adding a price to it. That's all the effort needed to turn this into a product (besides rewriting the App Store description so that people other than himself can parse what the application actually does).