Hi,
As some of you know I’m an avid Ardour user and the developer of AV Linux, I just got an email telling me about this new Linux A/V Distro that looks…familiar. Geez the guy even copied my screenshots, description, artwork and everything. I wanted to post this to allay any confusion about what is what and who is who since most AV Linux traffic comes from this forum.
Thanks -GLEN
That’s why you want to protect your works with trademarks! The Open Source Definition makes it totally clear that “protecting the integrity of the Author’s work” is an honorable expectation and promise. But it’s much, much more clumsy to try to do this with licensing than it is with trademarks.
Did you already try contacting this person? Or posting in his blog, I’ll gladly post on it telling him how cheap he looks doing this, but then again, he’s got administrative privileges there…
Every 5 seconds there’s a sucker born into this world.
Too late, I already posted there…
Joe,
Thanks for your support, I truly appreciate it, I have posted on the blog so hopefully that will do something.
I would just like to clarify that AV Linux includes Remastersys to encourage people to customize it to their own liking and create their own Remasters and Backups for personal use. I have permission to include the linuxDSP plugins however it is not legal to re-distribute them without permission.
AV Linux like any other Distro came from somewhere and is based in part on something that already existed, I certainly make no claim that it is a wholly original work…I have tried to contact or credit the developers of the included applications even though they are for the most part open source, My main concern was the blatant copying of the artwork, screenshots and verbatim copying of the website info as well as the violation of linuxDSP’s license.
I want to be clear that I encourage people to do what they like with AV Linux providing they don’t redistribute without the appropriate contact and permissions.
If you look at the mainpage he seems to have run into problems with his enhancements and (temporarily) stopped his work as of June 28. He also seems to have removed the ISO.
One way out of this mess could perhaps be collaborating, assuming his enhancements are something other than just ‘s/AV Linux/Demon LinuX/’ and that you want to and can get in touch with him.
And perhaps get an official apology for the blatant copyright intrusion.
Google cache still has his old page (demonlinux.phpnet.us) where in June 07 it stated “Demon LinuX is a project to take the existing Debian distribution and remaster it as a LiveCD/DVD and Desktop distribution. It provides all multimedia codecs, graphical and productivity applications out of the box” and "Demon LinuX is what is left of a site called “Demon ShareZ”. In the coming days, I will be building this site and will determine the direction it will take.
The “Scene” that Demon ShareZ was a part of is now not the scene I want to be a part of. I have taken another road and this is why I have created Demon LinuX. "
peder,
Nice detective work Sherlock! “ShareZ” is an interesting term, is it the open-source variant of WareZ?
While an interresting thought, google (http://www.ultimatezone.org/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=57963) and Wayback (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://demonsharez.com) point towards an ordinary warez scene.