Dear Sir/Madam, I thought you might be interested in my following correspondance with the FSF - there is someone who is seriously violating the GPL under which OpenOffice.org is licenced and I have been advised to notify you. So, here goes!
Regards, M. B. -------------------Forwarded message below------------------- Sent to FSF-Violations by Wolphin ----- > Dear Sir, I have come across violations of the GPL at Luxuriousity <http://luxuriousity.com>. [Note: The site's index has been taken down. You can find their violated OpenOffice.org here: http://www.luxuriousity.com/office.htm<http://luxuriousity.com/karaoke.htm>. You could also try to use Google's cache to see the original web page] Luxuriousity are selling GPL'ed software like OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, MySQL AB, Audacity and a few others under different names, such as "Luxuriousity Office Professional", "Luxuriousity Media Player", "Luxuriousity Multi-Track Music Studio Professional" and others. Now, quite a few people who have bought Luxuriousity products have realised that they are actually the same as programs they already had - or which they could download for free, instead of $29.99. While this is a complete scam, I believe that it is not there where the GPL is violated, but rather the fact that the source is not distributed with the products (I have contacted a few of the disappointed purchasers) and it is not available upon request (I sent an email as if I were a purchaser wishing to view the source code and received no reply). Some details follow: Precise name of the product: There are several. Luxuriousity: Office Professional, Office Deluxe, Email Document Viewer, Media Player, Multi-Track Music Studio Professional, Karaoke Professional, the list goes on... Name of organization: Luxuriousity Inc. Postal address: Luxuriousity Inc. P.O. Box 5670 Santa Monica CA 90409 US More info to be found here: http://samspade.org/t/lookat?a=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.luxuriousity.com%2F Name of violated package: There are various. OpenOffice.org, VLC, The GIMP, Audacity, MySQL AB, and more. How the license was violated: The source code is completely missing. I have posted about this on my blog: http://wolphination.com/linux/2006/01/19/luxuriousity-oss-application-scammer/ , which may offer some more information. Thank you, M. B. ----- Sent by FSF-Violations to Wolphin Yep, this is definitely a problem. You should write to the copyright holders of the software in question to let them know. -Dave "Novalis" Turner GPL Compliance Engineer Free Software Foundation
