[android-developers] Re: Open source devs, read this... someone might try to make money with your project

As much as I hate the DCMA, and its abuses, this is not an abuse, but
the sort of case it should be used for.

(I'm not a fan of GPL, either, but I support your right to choose it
and enforce it.)

But one thing you can do -- is post a comment, and regularly modify it
(even a trivial mod) to keep it recent. Something along the lines of
"This is an unauthorized buggy rip-off of EmailAlbum -- you might like
that better."

Normally I object to posting comments on competitor's products, but
not in cases like this.

Can I ask what your goals were in making it open source?

On Aug 9, 6:14 am, Kevin Gaudin <kevin.gau...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am the developer of the GPL application EmailAlbum (http://
> emailalbum.googlecode.com) and the library ACRA (http://
> acra.googlecode.com) which allows application to send crash reports to
> google docs spreadsheets.
>
> For a few weeks, my ACRA spreadsheet for EmailAlbum has been receiving
> a few crash reports from a SDK which was not mine. Since it is open
> source, no problem, this just indicated that someone did checkout the
> project but was not aware of the ACRA config.
>
> This morning, the spreadsheet is receiving lots of crash reports from
> an application that has just been published on the Android Market :
> MailboxAtlas
>
> It appears to be a "forked" version of my current unreleased
> developments on EmailAlbum, with lots of Force Closes and addition of
> advertisements.
>
> If you go read the comments of other applications from this dev called
> "social music"http://www.appbrain.com/browse/dev/social+musicit
> clearly looks that this guy is trying to make money by publishing
> slightly modified (and buggy) versions of open source software with
> the addition of ads.
>
> I don't know if we can do anything to prevent this but I wanted to
> share this with you...
>
> Kevin

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