![]() ![]() A licence can't even simply specify "This Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" as was the case with Douglas Crockford's jsmin.c which caused problems on projects derived from it. The Open Source Definition specifically disallows discrimination against fields of endeavour in clause 6, and this has led to issues in the past where projects have added no military use clauses to their licences. So what solutions could be applied to help projects protect themselves? One obvious solution, changing the licence to forbid malicious redistribution, is unfortunately not available. Currently, the trademark is between organisations (Oracle and Apache Software Foundation). Simon Phipps wrote that he was "especially worried that there’s no-one protecting end-user from these sorts of scams at present or, as far as I can tell, any time in the near future". Searching for OpenOffice gives similar results to searching for VLC and Firefox – there's a good chance you'll get links from a scammer. So, although trademarks can offer the ability to protect, they are extra work both for the holder of the trademark and the legitimate community around the software.Īnother application that can be found suffering similar exploitation and abuse is OpenOffice. Even with a trademark, there is a lot of work to be done in 2009, for example, Mozilla posted about how they had to assert claims against 15 European sites, halt 122 US sites, review 4,300 sites, report a number of sites to consumer protection agencies, recover 50 domains and alert search engines. Hence the creation of IceWeasel and GNU IceCat, which are Firefox, less the trademark elements (and in IceCat's case, with some additional modifications). For example, Firefox's trademark is protected by Mozilla, but because that protection imposes limits on what can be done with the trademarks, it is considered incompatible with free software ethics. Currently, the best advice the VideoLAN developers can give is to ask people to let others know that the place for VLC is Trademarks also cause issues for some free software projects. But that enforcement costs money and time, both things that most open source projects are short of. For example, trademarks can be obtained and enforced so that at least the charlatans can't call what they sell by the well known name, and in some case, they can be prevented from purchasing "ad words" which get their ad displayed when someone searches for the program. There are some legal protections which can be used. Not to mention that it also discredits our work as volunteers and that it’s time-consuming, time that is not invested in the development. The result is a poor product that doesn’t work as intended, that can’t be uninstalled and that clearly abuses its users and their privacy. The VLC developers have recently spoken out about companies like this who have been selling the VLC video player as if they wrote it. The problem is that many of these companies often bundle the open source code with proprietary software and don't conform to the requirements of licences like the GPL. Technically, there's nothing illegitimate about charging for open source code as long as you work within the licence. There is the less illegal, but often unethical, practice of taking open source and just selling it without adding any value. These criminal types have another trick up their sleeve: they can take popular open source programs, compile in their malware or just bundle it into the installer, and then advertise it for sale on the net. This shouldn't be surprising when you consider there are scareware merchants who are prepared to trick users into believing their systems are infected with viruses to get them to pay for non-functioning anti-virus software which often includes malware. ![]() The answer, unfortunately, is no, because there are people who are more than happy to use open source to distribute malware. When someone searches for OpenOffice, Firefox, VLC or any other popular open source package on the internet, are they necessarily going to get the genuine article? The FOSS fakery problem by Dj Walker-Morgan ![]()
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