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

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(a)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(a)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