4 ms·

Selling a commercial product by using the name of a popular open source tool is definitely not "more moral".

• sshine 1y ago
  Let's call it "advertise his own product", since he gives the software away for free and hardly makes money on licenses. I would say that it is. He is freeriding on the PuTTY brand name to popularise his own SSH client. It definitely has an element of being questionable. It won't win him the Nobel Peace Prize. But it isn't even a "dark pattern": He's not tricking anyone to make the wrong choice. He has provided a clear and unambiguous download path to the original PuTTY for two decades. Which of doing that and selling a domain to the highest bidder has had more value to PuTTY? I remember using the putty.org domain 20 years ago when I was still a Windows user, and remembering "I know this isn't the official site, but he forwards to the real distribution page, so there's no risk." And it never was any different. I find it a little incredible that the moral police comes around decades later, when I remember one sentiment back then was "Wow, he's making the effort to make PuTTY more reachable, what a nice guy."