Chris Ball sent the following bits through the ether:
> I used to use At-mail a lot at work. Pseudo-interesting question of the
> day; do you really feel it was ripped off (in the stigmatism-attached
> sense of the word), or given that it was GPLed or Artistic'd anyway, that
> it's fair play to them and that's something that happens when you Give
> Code To The World sometimes?
OK: I released acmemail under GPL&AL because I wanted it to be used by
the most amount of people and I wasn't intending to make money off it.
@Mail (http://webbasedemail.com/) copied my code, my docs, and my
images without telling me, added a configuration file, and sold it. I
only found out about it by accident, which wasn't good. (it's changed
a lot since).
If I remember correctly, they got around any license issues by selling
the webmail servers to companies as a service, and not a product.
They could have handled it better. They could have told me about it,
asked about selling it / giving me a token present. They could have
given patches back to acmemail and not forked the code too much. I
wasn't happy at all with them at the time. They sent me nasty letters
about my accusations. It was blatently my code.
Overall, kudos to them, they appear to be able to sell a simple Perl
script for $$$$ a pop to large corporations.
So either I break up and cry at how lax the Artistic License is and
inflict viral GPL on all my code, or I just keep on going hacking
code. Which do I do? ;-)
Hmmm, let's rewrite the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but as a failure for
open source in this case ;-)
Leon
--
... Squeeze
