Hi Morgan,

I am writing this on the Open Discussion forum since I would like to have an open discussion about this issue and my comments.

I like JBidWatcher very much and I appreciate your great work! One of the reasons why I like and use JBidWatcher is because of his free software license.

Your consideration to switch to a closed source license doesn’t make me happy. Switching to a closed source license is a big step and affects all your users. Do you really think that this is an appropriate step, just because one of your users was doing someting wrong with your software?

You wrote that courts are not comfortable with open source. But it has nothing to do with open source if someone is renaming your program and selling it as his own work. It has to do with your copyright and you are still the copyright holder. An open source license does not change your copyright.

If you look at the GPL violations page at http://gpl-violations.org/ you will see that courts are comfortable with free software.

I fully understand that you are angry because of the occurrence but please think about all your honesty users. Is it worth to change your development just because of a few idiots?

I vote for an open source development of JBidWatcher!

I wish you and all readers a Merry Christmas!

Andreas Stempfhuber

I am an XP Pro user (no plans to switch to Vista any time soon) and happen to like my open source applications. I have OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. I have no expectation, however, that a particular app ought to be free. I am a heavy ebay user and my spouse’s business is dependent on it. I use apps them because they work, not because they are free.

Free software works only when 1) there isn’t a huge incentive to pirate it to make money, or 2) there is a large developer community (linux) or corporate backer (open office) that is willing to go after the cheats.

People have lives and have to make a living. It’s not reasonable to expect Morgan to do this for free unless a whole lot of volunteers are willing to get behind a development project and help code and police it. But I suspect MOST jbidwatcher users are like me—rabid ebayers without any software development skills whatsoever.

If Morgan chooses to keep this open source I am willing to volunteer on the enforcement side within ebay if it gets registered in the VERO program. Hunting down and reporting thieves with carefully crafted searches is not really that difficult. But I would also be perfectly happy paying a reasonable license fee. In the six months I’ve been using it I’ve saved a bucketload of money.
For sure Jbidwatcher needs a few things (like better documentation for the clueless newbies). But it would frankly blow most of the competitors straight off the map with a bit more development.

I think a switch of sorts could be good for the program, and I’d definately go after the ass that stole it in the courts unless he pays the author every cent he made from it.

One option could be a dual-licenced version. One, that is open source, that contains pretty much the functionality in version 1.0 or slightly before. Everything else is in a licenced version, for a minimal fee.

Securing the program binary could be done in many ways, and while I’m not a Java programmer, here are a few suggestions;

1. A “fingerprint” in the binary that contains the purchaser’s details to allow for tracking if pirated copies.
2. Combined with the above, the facility for the program to “call home” to check these details against something, like the user’s IP address. If the details don’t match, the program nukes itself or, my preference, the users’ hard drive. Serve’s ‘em right for stealing.

I’m sure there are many more creative ways this can be done….

Jon

I just checked on eBay (auction # 270065880344, closing in January 07) and this bastard is still at it !! I have reported him to eBay, but I think a good way of canning his activities could be for everyone to register a fake eBay account and then bid ridiculous amounts for the software. He would have no chance of collecting. Childish, probably – effective, most definately !

Auction 270065880344 ended on 18.12.06.

moldor wrote:

One option could be a dual-licenced version. One, that is open source, that
> contains pretty much the functionality in version 1.0 or slightly before.
> Everything else is in a licenced version, for a minimal fee.

Thanks for your comment, but your suggestion has unfortunately nothing to do with dual-licensing. Dual-licensing means that the same version of the software is available under two licenses and the user can choose which license he would like to use. But your suggestion is to stop developing the open source version and release every new version under a proprietary license. That has nothing to do with dual-licensing. It is a step to switch an open source project into a closed source one.

Also everything that is already available under the LGPL license, including the 1.0 version and the current CVS snapshot, is already open source. You can change the license but since the source is already open source it will have no effect. Everyone who has already downloaded it under the LGPL license is allowed to share it under the same license. And I think that’s good so.

Securing the program binary could be done in many ways, and while I’m not a
> Java programmer, here are a few suggestions;

So you are suggesting to spend man and developing power to “secure” an application because of a few idiots, making the application more complex and harder maintainable and restricting all honesty users, instead of using the same man and developing power for usefull developing steps like adding new features and fixing bugs?

And you think this few idiots are worth to spend time for them?

Andreas

Greetings,
db1ras says: But it has nothing to do with open source if someone is renaming your program and selling it as his own work. It has to do with your copyright and you are still the copyright holder.

I had to investigate this years ago, I’m afraid. I know more about this than I ever, ever wanted to. Now, however, too many people are breaking the social contract to respect the intent and preferences of the author for me to put up with it anymore.

The pretty much definitive word on this from the Open Source side: http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php ‘What you can’t do is stop someone else from selling your code as well.’

If you want the FSF’s take, equally definitive: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney ‘The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software.’

If you have contradicting legal information, let me know.

The only things that stop this from happening to every open and free project is inertia and the cohesive technical community. As long as you’re building tools to make tools, the other toolmakers have got your back. As soon as you make tools for everyone’s use, you’re on your own.

I’m not going to add ‘licensing assurance’ tricks into the program, it’s a eBay monitor and bidding tool, not a trillion-dollar financial application or 3d design app. That’s unnecessary and overkill. A license which forbids what’s being done is all that is needed. That license happens to make the next versions of the program non-open and non-free (as in liberty, not dollar value), but that’s a cost I’m comfortable living with. I’ll be setting up a forum on www.jbidwatcher.com soon, to replace this forum, the last part of Sourceforge I’m regularly using.

I still don’t plan to charge money for JBidwatcher. Some of my reasons for not charging money are still equally valid, most importantly that I cannot assure that from day to day the program won’t be broken by eBay randomly, and so I feel uncomfortable offering for ‘sale’ a program that can simply stop working for reasons out of my control.

Oh, and just for the record… I HATE THIS SHIT. I loathe dealing with scammers on one side and holy-warriors on the other, and it’s the decent people in the middle, who just want a decent program to do their thing, and don’t care (and shouldn’t need to care!) about the holy war OR the scams, who get burned. It’s those people I write JBidwatcher for.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hi Morgan,

are we talking about stealing software or about selling it?

Selling free and open source software (FOSS) is of course allowed. That’s one of the basic freedom of FOSS licenses. Every FOSS license allowes it. A license that forbids selling is a non-free license in the scope of the FOSS idea.

There is nothing wrong with selling FOSS software as long as it is done under the terms of the license. One term is that the copyright notice of the original author must be intact. Stealing software means that the license is violated. E.g. the copyright notice was removed, replaced with a different one and someone else has published the software as his own work. That’s stealing. You mentioned that this was the case and my mail was based on this information.

But selling is a standard procedure and a basic freedom of FOSS licenses. Many Linux distributions are doing it and many hardware manufacturers are doing it, too. Look at your internet router, telephone system, mobile phone, satellite receiver … there is FOSS running on many of such devices and sold together with the hardware. The hardware is useless without the FOSS.

Nobody who is selling FOSS software is breaking the social contract to respect the intent and preferences of the author. The freedom to sell the software is part of the social contract. Nobody is stealing the software just because he is selling it. Selling the software under the terms of the FOSS license is a respect testifying to the author of the software and his great work.

If you think about free software think about the freedom it provides for you and everyone else and think about the freedom that you can provide to everyone else if you return something to the free and open source community. Do not think with the limited possibilities of the non-free software world, many of their rules don’t work outside.

JBidWatcher is your hobby project and as every hobby you do it because you have fun. Don’t let others spoil your hobby and fun and don’t let yourself spoil it by applying unsuitable rules of the proprietary software world to your hobby project.

Best wishes and a Happy New Year!

Andreas

Greetings,
You don’t get it. I can only presume it’s because it’s never happened to you. I sincerely hope it never does, and that shiny faith in the world sticks with you for all your life.

Nobody should have that sick feeling, staring at something they built, alone, for the love of it, being sold by a complete stranger as theirs.

Horror and humiliation and a deep, sweeping sadness, which for me reduced me to tears, and made me seriously consider stopping work on it entirely. Even this doesn’t capture it. It’s indescribable.

No license file attribution (which nobody reads anyway) can change that. I don’t know if credit was given someplace inside SnipeIt (it certainly wasn’t in the auction itself), as I didn’t PAY to buy the program I DEVELOPED from the person who had renamed it and was selling it as their own.

Stick to building ‘tools to make tools’ and infrastructure projects like the ones you talk about, where respect is the currency of the land, and there are hundreds of people contributing together. Stick to projects where your holy war fits, and makes sense.

I’ll even consider using a FOSS license for projects where only other toolmakers will see it, but never again for an end-user facing project. Never. I’ve learned my lesson.

You don’t understand, and that’s okay. May you never understand.

— Morgan

You are quite correct, Morgan, it’s never happened to me. But having had hypocrites at my former place of employment (a Catholic University) take credit for my hard work gives me some understanding, albeit minor, of the impact it must have had on you.

Seeing that he is still at it cause the vindictive bile to rise, I assure you – but apart from complaining to eBay (pretty ineffective), or “blocking” his auctions (also of doubtful usefulness), what can we (the jBidWatcher community) do to help ? Anything ?

Hi Morgan..
First of all I love Jbidwatcher. I completely understand that you don’t want people to sell the software you’ve worked on.

AFAIK——The thing is the (L)GPL, which Jbidwatcher uses, was designed to allow people to sell and redistribute software , but the special protection it provides is that distributers MUST PROVIDE THE SOURCE WITH BINARIES, (which has the side effect of stopping the Microsoft “embrace, extend, and extinguish” tactic).

There’s a bunch of licenses here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

that could probably allow for non-commercial open source, if you still decide to open source it.

Anyways, good luck with software and I look forward to future versions in whatever form they come…

The other thing I wanted to mention is that maybe you could beat them at their own game by selling jbidwatcher on ebay. You could advertise it as the original or something and maybe sell it in a nice case with the instruction manual or something like that. You deserve to benefit from this program more than anyone else, for sure.

Morgan,

you write: “Nobody should have that sick feeling, staring at something they built, alone, for the love of it, being sold by a complete stranger as theirs.”

Linus Torwalds, the original developer of the Linux operating system is every day in this situation, but does not feel as you feel. Linux is copied every day, introduced into embedded systems (routers, NASs, mobile phones etc) without even mentioning that there is Linux inside. But it is just for that that Linux is so much appreciated and popular.

In his book Linus Torwalds wrote that this is just what he wants (to have other people using his work, selling it for a profit). Why? Because, (he tells in his book) it was the only way to get other people helping him to build the great code that Linux actually is. Linus Torwalds had the humility to understand that he needs help, that he cannot do all alone. And he was right, everybody con confirm it now. There was no other way to build Linux other than opening the code.

So the matter is not of holy-warriors or scammers. The matter is to work alone or work with the help of a community. Certainly there is people that prefer to work alone and there is nothing wrong about that. But if you want help, if you enjoy working with other people, you have no choice, but to open the code.

And feelings? there is nothing wrong living with strong feelings. But we should be careful to avoid being a slave of our feelings. A feeling is just a feeling, but a human being is much more than his/her feelings or thoughts, or acts.

Why am I writing you these things? Well you donated something and are receiving something different back.

Greetings,
If you read through all this, you’d understand that there’s a difference between infrastructure projects, where a community of developers forms, and end-user applications, where they really generally don’t. You have to pay people to work on end-user apps, as the work that needs doing is nowhere near as interesting. :(

I’ve been doing this for around 8 years and I can count on one hand the number of people who have contributed useful code to JBidwatcher, and still have at least one finger left over to show my feelings towards those who rebrand my work as their own. I treasure those users who have contributed, but in no way are they a community. In fact, I believe no two of them contributed within 6 months of each other.

JBidwatcher doesn’t attract the kind of users that ‘a new Unix implementation’ does. People need to learn that not all open source projects are alike; the communities that are drawn to different tiers of projects are entirely different. The JBidwatcher ‘community’ that has grown is a support-based community, not a development-based community. (Witness the violent reaction to my including scripting in the app…)

I deeply respect and appreciate open source infrastructures; it’s become clear to me that end-user applications don’t work the same. There are open source applications, but they are generally only actually used by people who COULD develop for them.

JBidwatcher is written for everybody, and since it’s not a ‘platform’, it does not draw in even a medium sized community of developers who would (or could) help build it.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Greetings
Interesting…
I did not appreciate the difference. Thanks for explaining it

I have no personal experience to confirm or not what you say, but it seems reasonable.

Yet what about Firefox or emule? Aren’t they end-user applications? Participation and success has been spectacular.

Certainly a software to bid on ebay cannot attract the same interest as a browser or a file exchange application, yet when they get 200 developer you may get perhaps 2. Better than none.

Well maybe I am writing that only because feel lonely. Sometimes it is just better to be alone.

Greetings,
You are right, I didn’t include the ‘audience size’ factor, which emule and Firefox have in spades. JBidwatcher is a niche application, unfortunately.

I’ll grant you freely, if JBidwatcher 1.x had developed a developer community which had contributed much of the app’s code, I would probably not have as violent a reaction. It did not, however, and so the work being rebranded was virtually entirely mine. And it hurt.

Having an open source application does not mean you will have a developer community; there are tens of thousands of open source apps out there who have zero developers other than the founder. (Just look at the wilds of Sourceforge for examples of this.) This usually means that the application will get shelved, as it is lonely, as a developer.

However, what I’ve found is that I treasure the user community that I have gotten, and they keep me going.

User communities often don’t care as much about the specifics of the licensing, as opposed to developer communities who care intensely.

That said, yeah, it is lonely sometimes being the only one responsible for the functioning of JBidwatcher. But it’s been quite amply demonstrated that it does not get any less lonely by having an open source license, it only opens it up to predation.

I hope this helps you understand the reasoning for moving away from a strictly open-source-compliant license in the 2.x series.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!