Sunday News

It has come to my attention that a company called AppZilla has created a commercial shareware version of InfraRecorder. They have replaced the original copyright notices and license with their own. They refuse to release the source code under the terms that was given to them and clearly violates the GPL license that InfraRecorder is released under.

I don’t want to link to their website from here, a URL is available among the comments from the previous news post. I don’t encourage anyone to download their modified software, it may contain malicious code. It’s possible that it’s not functional at all.

I thought that a word of warning was in place since their modified software is available at some major software sites like for example download.com.

Thanks to the user called paranoid for bringing this to my attention.

And now some good news. I will release the translation information for the upcoming version of InfraRecorder this week and the new version will be released shortly after.

16 Responses to “Sunday News”

  1. shamka says:

    iuhuuuu. just can’t wait for the new version. 🙂

  2. Hi Christian,

    This is really sad !

    You should probably send a GPL violation Report to the FSF :
    http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-violation.html

    Yours,

    Pierre-Jean

  3. Ola Lindberg says:

    Hi Christian, They should be ashamed!
    Can’t wait for your next release. Good work!

  4. Pete Boyd says:

    You could issue a cease & decist letter(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist) to download.com to get them to remove the program. They’d likely remote it down straight away.

  5. Alexey Diyan says:

    Hi Christian,

    I want to wish you good luck in your development and hope that problem with GPL violation will be solved.

  6. Arcadia says:

    This is exactly why we must use the GPL, and make sure it is enforced! So that companies can’t steal from our common code pool for selfish profit.

  7. Dimas says:

    Uou, I waiting for the new version 😀 I hope some bugs burning DVDs were solved… Thx for InfraRecorder 🙂

  8. Leif Thande says:

    You should report it to http://gpl-violations.org/ . This might help to make that company either release the source code or stop selling it.

  9. Mark says:

    Report them, if they don’t back down GPLv2 allows law suits.

  10. Glow says:

    They violating the license of another software called DVDFlick.
    If you need help, make an announcement on you site, free software community can try to stop that.

    Keep up the good work.

  11. Kadath says:

    Hell yeah, updates!

    Also, definitely report those morons to the FSF for violating the GPL. They’re breaking the law.

  12. Brittany Fox says:

    It seems Mr Nir Halowani is already known about GPL violations…
    Look at this:

    “On April 4th (2006), Nir Halowani, CTO of Infima Technologies announced an Archiver called “Infima – Ultimate Compressionâ€? which claimed to achieve best lossless compression on *all* types of data…”

    http://www.c10n.info/archives/415

  13. paranoid says:

    Thank you C.K.

  14. Bob Good says:

    Hello Christian,

    Yes it’s me (the dude from Virginia who emailed you with a question about multi-session and fixating a disc).

    Sad to hear that someone has stolen your work and claimed it as their own. Hopefully something can be done about it. I wish you luck on that effort.

    On a side note, I’ve discovered that InfraRecorder seems to record/run quite well in Linux (Ubuntu Gnome in my case) under Wine. The only function I haven’t tried yet is burning an ISO image. I plan on spreading the word to the Linux community after a few more tests.

    P.S.
    I run InfraRecorder in Vista was well.

    Your friend,
    Bob Good

  15. Eric J Morey says:

    Here is the link for the Whois information for the app-zilla.com domain name. http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=app-zilla.com

    Please contact the owner of the domain name to ask them to cease & desist their illegal distribution of software as suggested by Pete Boyd.

    Also provide this information to the FSF (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-violation.html) as suggested by Pierre-Jean Coudert.

    Eric J Morey…

  16. Stephan Paternotte says:

    Here’s how Rick Brewster of Paint.Net dealt with a similar case of “Backspaceware”, as he calls it.
    http://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/07/tips-for-dealing-with-backspaceware/

    Stephan