There remains this strange discrepancy between what people are outraged about and what could potentially stand in court.
> Wah. They're immoral scammers by any examination. They're suckering > people into not only buying free software, but public domain materials as > well! > I think the truth is simpler. They only make sales by misleading > the customer into thinking they are getting something else. Yes. That much is quite evident, but that's not illegal. In most parts of the world, getting the customer to pay for something which he could get otherwise cheaper or even for free is considered a clever business model. I've seen hotels and commercial wifi operators charging for their services in the vicinity of a free wifi spot. I am offering my Elvish introductionary courses for free as pdf downloads, but due to numerous people asking for it also for sale in ebook formats (one'd think it's a matter of simply running a converter, but apparently people are happier paying 5 bucks for something they could get for free). I've seen a photographer offering pictures of Arches National Park for 4000 US$ where I could get posters of the same quality for 20 US$ in the part office. That's just how our societies work. So, if you're fair, you have to give the same treatment to your bank which promises you top-grade investments where in truth we've all seen they're frequently after the fees they can get for the transaction and are otherwise happy to sell any crap to private investors. You have give the same treatment to the travel agent who promised sea view from the hotel room and forgot to mention that there's actually another hotel right in front of you and you can see the sea only on the periphery. You can extend that to your internet provider who promises fast and reliable service, and yet when there's a problem, strangely you find yourself for hours on end holding the line and talking to evidently incompetent service agents. And so on. For the record, I feel that none of this is okay, and I feel there should be a law against it. But there isn't, and I just have to bloody accept that the world isn't run by my standards of how it should be. Also, taking someone else's GPL licensed work for free and making a profit from it isn't illegal or a violation of GPL (that's what seems to upset most people). The actually potentially problematic things about FlightProSim mentioned so far are: * screenshots which can't be produced with the product (when I checked the website, I saw only Flightgear screenies, so I don't even know that first hand) - that's no more a crime than all the juicy meals shown on micro-wave ready foods. * probably self-created reviews and enthusiastic customer statements all over the place. Well, bugger me, but I do see Miss. Ann X from Austin, Texas claiming how product Y completely changed her life every time I'm in the US... Should I really believe that she's the genuine thing, a randomly picked customer feeling compelled to make a statement? Do we really believe that authors never ask their friends for enthusiastic reports on Amazon? That doesn't really seem to be a crime either. * the money-back guarantee, no fuss, turns out to be more difficult than expected in practice. Personally, I've yet to experience the one case in which a money-back guarantee turns out to be easy if you actually want to come back to it. I'd say that is fairly normal as well, at least I had two months of arguments with Dell before I got my money back. * violations of GPL because the source code is not really available. So we're really down from fraud to the availability of source code on a website - and if FlightProSim would make all the code easily available by simply cloning the Flightgear repositories, you'd all be happy because they are now in complicance with GPL? Somehow I don't think so, somehow I think this isn't what upsets people. Just face it - we live in a society in which not stating the honest trusth about a product, overcharging the customer whenever you can get away with it and otherwise deceiving him about what exactly he is about to buy is not only commonplace, but also legal and in many cases even considered desirable. I know of plenty of business models exploiting loopholes in the law - FlightProSim is in good company. A good part of freedom as given by GPL is the freedom of others to do things you don't want done. Consider it the pricetag for freedom. * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
