Bad advocacy

January 26, 2006 2:38 pm Dave Neary General

To celebrate my recent addition to Planet Advocacy, I’m going to tell a little story about bad advocacy. In fact, it’s hard to call this advocacy at all…

About 6 months ago, the GIMP developers were contacted by a concerned citizen about a company called Luxuriousity, who was rebranding and selling free software on-line, via Ebay and on their website. The person contacting us believed there were shenanigans going on, and that we should unleash the lawyers on them, or something.

I contacted Luxuriousity via the email address on their site, and asked whether they were aware of the conditions imposed by the GPL on distribution of binaries. They were, and pointed me towards gimp.org as a way to get the full source code. I did ask if they had an FTP server where I could get their modified sources, but they didn’t have one, and said they didn’t need one, since they included the source code on the CD they ship with the binaries, and provide an offer of source code on a CD to anyone who asks.

So, there’s two issues here.

First, Luxuriousity are selling GPL software. That is fine. Nothing wrong with it, there’s no requirement in the GPL to give credit, they haven’t removed copyright notices from source files, if they’re making money out of it it would be nice to help out and sponsor things like <plug>the Libre Graphics Meeting</plug> but there’s no requirement to do so.

Second, there’s the trademark issue. Luxuriousity rebrands the original programs, so there is no trademark issue. In fact, some people (notably MySQL) have insisted that they not use their trademarks, so they now consciously avoid the issue by renaming everything. This is no different than Inkscape being a rebranding of Sodipodi, or CinePaint rebranding the GIMP.

Now, these are complex issues that I don’t fully understand myself, and many in our community have strongly-held and passionate misunderstandings of these issues that go far beyond my own. People feel wronged (hurt even) that someone is “stealing” something they hold so dear and making a quick buck out of it by pretending it’s their own work. But since the copyright notices are intact, there is no such pretense. The developers have simply allowed people to redistribute their work.

If you followed the link to the Luxuriousity site earlier, you will have seen “System is currently down”. If you look for their software on ebay, you won’t find it. If you try to buy software from some of the pages behind the front page which are now available, you won’t be able to. Our community, on the basis of a flawed understanding of our foundations, has collectively hounded the company out of business. Their Ebay and Paypal accounts have been cancelled, and their server has been subjected to multiple DDOS attacks. They made the front page of digg, and some of the comments on that story are shameful:

1:

He’s gonna get DDOS by a whole bunch of people. i just know it. i hope so at least.

2:

http://digg.com/security/Kicking_A_Spammer_In_The_Nuts_Daily_Turns_Out_To_Be_Effective

You know what to do.

3:

Get wget or soemthing similar installed and in your system path variable and put the following in a .bat file:

:up
wget http://www.luxuriousity.com/images/sidephoto.jpg
del sidephoto.jpg
goto up

then just run it and hope he enjoys the bandwidth bill.

This type of behaviour does not do any favours to us or to our community. It’s against the spirit of free software. In fact, it makes me sick to think about it. The free software community I know and love is a fuzzy happy hippy place where people do good for their neighbours for no other reason than it gives them pleasure to make the world a better place.

It’s clear that that community has grown fast, and not everyone has taken the time to understand the nuances of what we do – we have a huge job to educate newcomers about the freedoms which we give to people by using the GPL. We cannot tolerate this kind of behaviour, and the only way to prevent it is education. Let’s make sure the diggers and slashdotters know what it means to be part of the free software community – not just the benefits, but the responsibilities as well.

7 Responses

  1. Michael Schumacher Says:
    January 27th, 2006 at 2:15 am

    I don’t consider people who do things like 1, 2 and 3 to be part of the (or any) “community”. Maybe the community of script kiddies.

    So this is how the GIMP community has handled this issue so far: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171184
    My comment #6 is a shorter version of your blog entry (and unfortunately it contains many, many typos).

    I know I’m paranoid, but IMO the background of some of the people who take part in such “punitive expeditions” should be examined more closely – after all, a “GPL software must not be sold” attitude *is* a good thing for vendors of non-GPL software. Viral marketing, anyone?

    Later comments indicate that there is a lack of a standard procedure in the case of a suspected GPL violation – someone should just have bought one copy from them (and get compensate from the donations, if this would have been a problem), examined it and reported what he found.

  2. Phil Says:
    January 27th, 2006 at 3:32 am

    Agreed; that is sad.

    But I also have to agree with Michael, I mean come on… “batch file”? These are kids who have read slashdot and perhaps a page or two from the OSI. I’m not convinced this is a problem within our community.

    Still, I wish the philosophy and motivations of the community were more apparent to outsiders who think it’s just a “let’s kill microsoft dead” deal.

  3. bliggle snaps Says:
    January 27th, 2006 at 7:31 am

    So you’ve actually seen the source code? Know someone who’s got it? Or are you just taking Luxuriousity’s side to get some controversy stirred up?

    Can you back up any of your claims that what they’re doing is legal with… I don’t know… anything? You say they didn’t modify the copyrights in the source code. So why don’t you post some snippets of that source code for us?

  4. Andy Fitzsimon Says:
    January 27th, 2006 at 7:35 am

    Companies that attach a worth to open source software often find an inroads to customers we would otherwise baffle with our open nature.

    Sure its not the best way to give back but they do provide a form of advocacy that we do not.

    Imagine the delight of a user who discovers that the software they paid for 3 months ago can be freely downloaded and run on the platform of their choice.

    So the digg kiddies who did this arent open source developers in my opinion because they dont hold the view that this is allowed by terms of our license and can be in many cases beneficial first step into free/libre software for people who otherwise wouldnt consider us.

    If inkscape is being rebranded at least they are promoting the use of free standards like svg so that artists can make a contribution 🙂

  5. Matt Brubeck Says:
    January 27th, 2006 at 3:23 pm

    My project (Audacity) was one of the free programs sold by Luxuriousity:
    http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.pl?LuxuriousitySound

    It’s true that he was within his rights to sell the software, but he did so in a deceptive way that was harmful to both his customers and to the free software community. He obviously relied on misleading his customers to prevent them from knowing that they could easily download the same software for free (even modifying screenshots on his site to remove identifying marks). When the customers inevitably found out, they sent angry letters to us (the open-source developers) because he left our names as the only contact information in the program. He offered no useful support to his customers. For a long time, dealing with angry Luxuriousity buyers accounted for more effort than any other user-support issue on our mailing lists. As a free software developers, we thrive on the goodwill of our users. In a very real way, Luxuriousity poisoned that goodwill, sapping both our time and our motivation.

    The Audacity developers exchanged several email threads with the owner of Luxuriousity, and he was unwiling to take any steps to work with us, or even to mitigate the obvious problems caused by his deceptive business practices.

    In my opinion, free software distributors (like all businesses) have a clear ethical obligation to be honest with their customers about the nature of their products. I have no problem with companies like Red Hat selling Linux CDs with Audacity, or with Griffin bundling Audacity with their sound hardware. But eBay scammers selling CD-Rs disguised as commercial software are providing a useful profit to no one, and ultimately harming the community they’re profiting from.

  6. Nicu Buculei Says:
    January 27th, 2006 at 6:54 pm

    Everything Matt said about Luxuriousity and Audacity I saw also at OpenOffice.org: deceived users shouting with anger at the OOo volunteers because of Luxuriousity, false claims on their website, etc.
    AFAIK, OOo project leaders also tried to contact Luxuriousity people and ended reporting them to eBay.

  7. Michael Schumacher Says:
    January 28th, 2006 at 2:36 am

    So… is anyone going to document this issue for the media in a proper way, or do we want them to come up with their own interpretation of this? I could imagine that e.g. Forbes would have a totally different view on the topic than e.g. Newsforge. And this is when the real trouble will start…

    Right now, I’m seeing a two-front war here:

    OSS Communities vs. Dubious Reseller vs. Vigilante Justice

    IMO two lines have to be drawn here – define what “dubious” means, and show the vigilantes that their actions aren’t tolerated, either.