[linux-audio-dev] Fw: Open letter to Steve Dekorte

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Hi all,

I just thought some you you might be interested in how a small mnority
of the MacOSX world sees the fruits of our hard work.

Regards,
Erik

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 18:20:39 +1100
From: Erik de Castro Lopo <nospam at mega-nerd.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Open letter to Steve Dekorte



Dear Mr Dekorte,

This has been emailed directly to you as well as being posted to
Usenet in the groups gnu.misc.discuss and comp.sys.mac.apps.

I am writing to you in regard to your shareware application for
MacOSX available here:

    http://www.dekorte.com/Software/OSX/SoundConverter/

Please also note that I am not charging you with contravening 
anyone's software license. I am however charging you with 
behaviour that is both morally repugnant and deceitful.

When I download the tarball you provide (for which you charge 
US$10 for a full license) I find the following files:

  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/macconverter
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/mppdec
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/qt_export
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/ringtonetools
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/scm2wav
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/sndfile-convert
  SoundConverter.app/Contents/Resources/sox

Here is some information about these programs:

  Program          Size   Author               Licence
  --------------------------------------------------------------
  ffmpeg           1.46M  Fabrice Bellard      LGPL
  macconverter       17k  ?                    ?
  mppdec             85k  Frank Klemm          GPL
  qt_export          56k  David Van Brink      Lootware???
  ringtonetools      94k  Michael Kohn         Non-comm. use only
  scm2wav            15k  Christoph Leuzinger  MIT License
  sndfile-convert   795k  Erik de Castro Lopo  GPL/LGPL
  sox              3.12M  various              LGPL

Now compare this with the only part of this tarball actually 
written by you, the SoundConverter binary which weighs in at 
399k.

 From the looks of this, your contribution to the total is 
significantly less than 10%. I would also argue that your 
contribution (a couple of hours with the MacOSX GUI builder) 
is far less that the amount of time and effort put in by the 
other people whose work you are using.

How can you possibly justify pocketing US$10 per license for 
work to which you have contributed well less than 10% of the 
total time and effort.

Furthermore, on the web site listed above, you display a credit 
for the guy who designed the icon, while none of the people who 
wrote the actual code get any credit whatsoever. Interestingly, 
many of the licenses above (GPL, LGPL, MIT etc) were developed 
to foster openness in the field of software development, much 
like the openness of scientific research. In scientific research
circles, it is considered important to credit the people whose 
work yours builds on. In this case, you have failed miserably 
to do so. If you were a researcher you would be charged with 
academic misconduct and fraud.

Now many people might think that you are just doing what Redhat, 
Suse and the other Linux distributors are doing; bundling up 
other people's software and selling it. However, I see a big 
difference. Redhat and Suse make huge contributions to the Free 
Software world; Redhat supporting GCC and GNU libc and Suse 
suporting KDE and ALSA.

In light of all this, I am curious to know, what is your 
contribution? If you aren't contributing I suggest that you
take all three of following three:

  a) Immediately, release the source code to SoundConverter 
     under a suitable free license.
  b) Donate all the money you have collected so far to the 
     Free Software Foundation or a recognised charity of your 
     choice.
  c) Add some credits on your webpage to the people who did
     the vast majority of the work.

I look forward to reading your response in one of the above 
public newsgroups.

Regards,
Erik


-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam at mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"He who writes the code gets to choose his license, and nobody
else gets to complain" -- Linus Torvalds