Ecosee, discussion about copyright, licenses and their plans

[phild]

This Ecosee service is very strange, and despite what is written above, the only form of credit to Pixelpost is in the "terms of service" page (who reads those ?), and comme par hasard with a typo (Pixlepost) !

The phrase of this so-called credit is so intricate that it looks like it's been written to avoid clarifying the relationship between Pixelpost and Ecosee :

LICENSING EXPLANATION OF CORE VERSUS SEPARATE SECTIONS
The following sections of our program are not being distributed as part of a whole of the original program and are therefore not subject to the GPL license that governs the body of the original platform and its source code. (…) In no way is EcoSee trying to change the licensing of these individual modules or attempting to claim development or warranty of their code and performance. Only the Vanilla Plan constitutes a distribution of the original source code project that is fully governed by the GPL. The Vanilla Plan is not modified in any way and is also available for download under the original developer's website. For further details regarding the core platform and the extended modules please visit Pixlepost.org

By the way, I don't see any "Vanilla Plan" in the offers.

On the other hand, Ecosee is very keen to build walls around its use of Pixelpost and derived templates and addons :

It is illegal To Remove The Following Designer Credit.
You may add to it, but you may not remove it under
copyright protection and punishable by law.

I haven't seen any mention of Pixelpost elsewhere in the website, neither authors of plugins used. No mention in the code of the demo site. Nothing in the FAQ.

Mr Ecosee, why don't you simply sell a hosting plan for Pixelpost photoblogs — or rather, say clearly that it is what you do ? Many hosters provide Wordpress pre-installs, for example, and just say so. Or do you fear competition from the very service that you hijack ?

It is true that if people realise that your added value is preinstalling Pixelpost on 100MB disk space for $99 / year, you will quickly run out of customers. Just for the sake of comparison (no endorsement there, it's just the first on a list, and not the cheapest ) :

DreamHost
“WordPress 2.6 auto-install and upgrade, 1 TB disk storage, 10 TB bandwidth, free domain, unlimited databases, 3000 email accounts, unlimited domain forwarding, Jabber support.” for $15 less.

Come on, clean-up your act, tell the truth, and give credit where credit is due.

[Dennis+]

This sound indeed very different than what we have discussed in the past. Let me make this clear: despite the fact I released the addons used in this package as GPL I do not waive my rights. The source is free to use and free to modify but still very much copyrighted by me.

Obviously you can make money by reselling programs released under the GPL. One of the other restrictions is that if you make modifications you HAVE to publish them to the world. Still haven't seen that.

And why not give something back to the developers? We spend countless hours providing something free for the community and other people start making money from it.

This, among others, is also the reason I don't release the latest version of the googlemaps addon to the public. I fear when Pixelpost 2.0 has arrived all my plugins will solely exists on either my own server or on the servers of friends.