Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Software Patents Linux

CherryOS Goes Open Source 370

netsniper writes "The CherryOS website now acknowledges a forthcoming alliance with Open Source Software! After going 'on hold' recently, a re-release of CherryOS is purported to be coming in May according to the site. This is great news on the surface, but let's see how it pans out. This move is probably a result of the many reviews of their product that set out to prove it was bogus."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

CherryOS Goes Open Source

Comments Filter:
  • how lies work... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jhealy ( 91456 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @08:58AM (#12164384)
    If your friend lies to you, and then comes clean... you maybe forgive them, but you never really respect them all that much, because you know they can lie to your face.
    CherryOS will never look that cool to any of us, because they only came clean because of being caught in a lie.
  • Re:Nothing to see. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RangerRick98 ( 817838 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @08:59AM (#12164395) Journal
    Actually, now that I've looked at the site, I can't help but wonder if they're announcing something else entirely. Maybe they mean that the "CherryOS" product is gone, and the cherryos domain is now for some phantom open source project that they plan to create under the name "Cherry" to try to regain some semblance of legitimacy.
  • Re:Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rpozz ( 249652 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:01AM (#12164405)
    There were some absolute bastards who registered azureus.org a while ago (seems to have changed now), and offered a version of Azureus which came bundled with spyware. Hopefully this sort of practice of exploiting free/open software doesn't become too popular.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:01AM (#12164410)
    Assume for a second that this was originally an ill-intentioned move to make money off the hard work of others. They shiny up OSS code and release it as their own, they try and sell it and are caught red-handed. They then try and go open-source but since the money won't be rolling in, they'll eventually just abandon the code. At least they'll have contributed some nice shininess to the OSS software project they stole from.
  • what happens if.. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:10AM (#12164457)
    They re-write the code that was borrowed from PearPC before it goes Open? Not only could they atleast still have a "business" to work with, but they're denying any proof that they did, infact copy PearPC and break the terms of the GPL.

    Wouldn't this also allow them to get off scott-free in any court case? Or atleast have the court case dropped?
  • by kahei ( 466208 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:21AM (#12164542) Homepage

    Notice how they can abbreviate that to

    Cherry O. S. Project

    and thence to

    Cherry OS Project

    and thence to

    CherryOS Project

    and finally

    CherryOS.

    I gotta respect them -- they're not just a _bit_ slimy, they are slimier than Fungus the Bogeyman in a barrel of natto!

  • by StateOfTheUnion ( 762194 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:26AM (#12164574) Homepage
    On the first link of the topic, Cherry OS's website, there is a GNU image from the FSF . . .

    Can Cherry OS put that on their website? Because they've alledgedly packaged up GPL software and sold it as their own closed source software, would the FSF allow them to use one of their trademarks?

    I am surprised by this behavior and chalk it up to what appears to me to be blatant disregard for GPL and the law.

  • Re:Ummm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:46AM (#12164746)
    It seems to be a popular tactic, especially in the P2P world.

    Shareaza suffers from this a lot: this free, open source application has been rebranded under a lot of different names (Etomi, bt86, etc.). Some sell the application (they actually sell 'support', if you read the fine print, with the 'support' being a copy of the Shareaza wiki), some bundle spyware with it, most do both.

    Limewire suffers from that too, and eMule probably too.

    They get users by paying for google ads that come up when you search for 'mp3 downloading' or similar. I guess it's true that a lot of people can't tell the difference between a genuine search result and an ad.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @09:53AM (#12164816)
    Does this mean that CherryOS has already lost their license to use the source code from PearPC?

    No, of course not.

    They haven't signed the GPL, so, as the GPL itself says, they are not bound by its terms. Therefore, that term does not apply to them if they do not accept it, and they are free to subsequently accept the terms of the GPL and make use of PearPC under it.

    They still aren't off the hook, though - the PearPC developers can still sue them for the copyright violations they have committed in the past.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:04AM (#12164923)
    I am going to play devils advocate for a moment.

    Have they actually commited any copyright violations yet? Have they actually violated the GPL yet?

    I only know what I have read on /. (hense my poor spelling abilities...) but I don't remember reading anything about it actually being distributed yet.

    If they have not actually distributed CherryOS yet, how can they be in violation of the GPL?

    (and yes, if they have been distributing it, then this is moot)
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:05AM (#12164938)
    I tried PearPC when it first started making headlines. Or at least when I first started reading headlines about it. Anyway, it's setup was somewhat cumbersome and I abondoned the attempt before finishing. From what I've heard from those that have reviewed CherryOS to prove that it was really PearPC is that the only original code seems to be the installer. That CherryOS made the installation of PearPC incredibly easier. My opinion is that they should release that (the installer).
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:09AM (#12164970)
    Whenever I hear a date spoken, it's usually said like this "April 7th, 2005"

    I've only ever heard that on American TV - in the UK we say 7th of April, 2005 instead.

    DDMMYYYY is a logical order in that it starts specific and becomes more general, much like postal addresses.

    YYYYMMDD is great for numeric sorting in computing, as it's correct for date order too.

    I can't really see any good reason to use MMDDYYYY at all, except "it matches the common spoken form in US English". Perhaps it's just another American mutation from real English, like dropping the 'u' in colour. :-)
  • It won't happen (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:17AM (#12165044)
    The creators of PearPC have withdrawn MXS' right to use their code (The GPL allows for this, apparently), due to prior illegal use thereof..
  • I have (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:18AM (#12165057) Homepage
    RTFL

    I have. But have you heard of a small legal principle called 'due process'? Once you've legally established that 4 has been violated, the license is revoked. It said so in the next sentence. Your claim that the license has been violated is not a conviction.

    Otherwise IBM would have had to stop shipping AIX long ago based on SCOs claim that the license is revoked. See the difference? If you want to terminate their license, you must prove (a preponderance of evidence) that there are grounds for termination.

    Kjella
  • by rincebrain ( 776480 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @10:22AM (#12165093) Homepage
    The company site has removed CherryOS from their product listings.

    http://www.mxsinc.com/ [mxsinc.com]
  • Re:It won't happen (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ciaran_H ( 579351 ) * <ciaran-slashdot@ t h e b lob.org> on Thursday April 07, 2005 @11:16AM (#12165576)
    Interesting. Do you have any links? I'm interested in seeing it. Not that I don't believe you, but I just hadn't heard it before.
  • by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @11:45AM (#12165883) Homepage Journal
    This dude should have kept a low profile from the start. He has been ripping of OSS Projects for years. CherryOS is only his latest victim. MXS has already pulled PDF Creator after it was shown to be a total ripoff of opensource, and their "flagship product" the VX30 java/web/video/whatever thing rips code from the following projects according to an analasys by 'eventhorizon' on the pearpc.net boards. These packages were all found by examining text strings, so there likely could be many more libraries, etc. that the strings have been stripped from.

    XviD
    MplayerC (windows gui frontend)
    FileDropListCtrl (no credit was given)
    DEFLATE code
    Inflate code
    JOrbis
    LAME

    Arben et al are lately trying to hide the stolen code by packing the executables via UPX or some similar or slightly modified PE compressor, so the analasys is being done on memory dumps of the binaries after decompression.

    Their VX30 products are priced from $1,000 up. Oddly enough, the VX30 product actually seems to work pretty well. At least in this particular case, it's a shame that with little more effort and perhaps the choice of a couple different libraries and methods of writing their application that could have legally produced and sold this product... at least until people find more stolen code in it :)
  • Re:Can they do this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by temojen ( 678985 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @12:20PM (#12166241) Journal
    As their project was a GUI wrapper for PearPC, they can open source the wrapper, but they can't distribute PearPC with it because their license has been revoked.
  • Re:It's Easy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by raynet ( 51803 ) on Thursday April 07, 2005 @12:21PM (#12166248) Homepage
    It all depends on who you sell the GPL product to and for what price. If the customer is a individual and price is 25euro, your source code will probably 'leak' to the world. But if you sell it to some company with price tag of 10.000euro, the company probably won't share the source code with anyone because they don't want their competitors get the software they paid for.
  • Re:It's Easy (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07, 2005 @01:50PM (#12167205)
    Usually only inexperienced developers think that. But even more importantly, non-developers (managers etc.) tend to think that all source code contains valuable "magic" stuff that must be protected at all costs.

E = MC ** 2 +- 3db

Working...