On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 8:07 PM, tueidj traden <[email protected]> wrote: > > The Google Code project named "SneekyCompiler" > (http://code.google.com/p/sneekycompiler/) is hosting several files that I > believe violate the terms of use for one or more of the following reasons:
I don't work for Google, but I have a few comments/questions about this. > - The original owner of the files has not given permission for them to be > distributed > - They contain proprietary code belonging to Nintendo, Inc. At least some of those programs are definitely open source, so the original owner doesn't need to give explicit permission. And it's not clear to me that any of the software being distributed is owned by Nintendo, though I could be wrong. Either way, if *you* aren't the owner of any of that, I think you are not in a position to complain about it--the owners can send a DMCA takedown request. > - They exist for the sole purpose of exploiting a weakness in Nintendo's > servers to circumvent paying for additional game content That is definitely not true of the SneekyCompiler, which is a wrapper around a suite of other programs, unless I misread the source code. > - No source code is provided for several programs despite the project being > labelled as using the GPLv2 license The SneekyCompiler program which is the focus of the project *does* provide source code (here: http://code.google.com/p/sneekycompiler/source/browse/trunk/main.cpp), and it was my understanding that it wasn't necessary to directly provide the code for support programs like wget. I could be wrong about this--could someone clarify? That said, the project does appear to be distributing a copy of winrar for some reason, so that at least does need to go. Maybe some of the others are not open source, but I'm not sure. Some of them certainly are. > The common term for these files is "warez" and I believe the maintainer of > the project is simply using the Google Code repository to host these files > for others to download, rather than its intended purpose. I don't agree with this assessment, but it's not my place to judge whether this violates the TOS. I just wanted to provide a little more information. -- Tracy Poff -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Project Hosting on Google Code" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting?hl=en.
