4 ms·
Has something like that ever happened? I always hear this sort of argument against BSD— "But what if a company takes your project, strips it of all references t
by ceol 14y ago
Has something like that ever happened? I always hear this sort of argument against BSD— "But what if a company takes your project, strips it of all references to the original, and sells it as closed-source proprietary?!"— but I've never heard of it actually being successful. The same with your example. Has that happened before, or is this just a case of premature optimization?
- FooBarWidget 14y agoNever heard about it happening to a BSD licensed project, but it has certainly happened to GPL licensed projects. Some years ago there was a company who rebranded a GPL'ed CD ripping program, removed all author credits and sold it without source. The authors eventually found out through disassembly.
- RexRollman 14y agoI think there was a company doing that with a PowerPC emulator some years ago. A hacker called them out on it. EDIT: CherryOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CherryOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CherryOS
- saurik 14y agoThe reason the GPL happened in the first place was because this happened to Stallman with the original version of Emacs he wrote with his friends. He started personally reimplementing every feature they added under a forcibly-free codebase to guarantee this would never happen to him again. (Additionally, this happened to me; I got totally shafted by assuming people would play fair with a BSD license, and the result was a closed-source commercial competitor with investment funding and a marketing department running rings around me. They really were reliant on my codebase, so temporarily closing source and moving to GPL undid some of the damage, but the consequences persist to today.)
- ceol 14y agoThanks for the reply! That's really interesting.