[SciPy-Dev] [Numpy-discussion] Verify your sourceforge windows installer downloads

[Todd]

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Benny Malengier <benny.malengier at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 2015-05-28 16:44 GMT+02:00 Sturla Molden <sturla.molden at gmail.com>:
> > Benny Malengier <benny.malengier at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Actually,
> >>
> >> they way I understand it, you should stay on SF, then they don't take
> >> over your project so as to 'help your userbase'.
> >>
> >> So, if you don't use SF anymore for your downloads, then they make an
> >> SF mirror of your project, and add their wrapper installer. Which is
> >> what happened to Gimp.
> >> As long as you use SF yourself to keep your downloads current, they
> >> don't interfere.
> >
> > Please explain why this is not a covert protection scam, because I
> > cannot...
>
> It is of course a scam. I moved all my stuff to github for hosting 6
> months ago when the writing was on the wall.
>
> I just want to point out they do not take over your project if you
> still use SF as a mirror. Gimp used their own mirror, so SF was only
> for historical data (old downloads). So SF still had costs, but no
> longer relevant traffic driving their webadvert income. There is a
> business case to be made that somehow the servers must be paid.
>
> What SF must do is allow to completely delete a project. And what OSS
> must do is trademark their name, so that if SF makes a download
> wrapper, you can sue them for using your name. Does that run with our
> counter our licence?
>
> The problem here is bad reputation for scipy/numpy due to SF. Our
> license is badly equiped to fight that one way or the other. As admin
> of the Gramps project, we have scammers just copying our software and
> selling it or offering it with a wrapper installer. And that is GPL
> licensed. Not much we can do, selling is allowed, and they don't
> change the sourcecode. But it does not feel right because they use
> your reputation to trick people. Trademark seems the only way out, but
> even then you would need lawyers to enforce it, ... and Debian would
> be protesting like with firefox.
>
>
The situation with debian and firefox is more complex than just having a
trademark.  Lots of open-source projects use trademark protection. But
Mozilla puts more conditions on the usage of its trademarks than, say, KDE,
Gnome or Python.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20150528/1a45080b/attachment.html>