When open source goes bad...

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 18:24 -0700, JD Austin wrote:
> I have a client that wants to build a large database application on a 
> shoestring budget so I thought I could give Rekall a try
> since I heard about it from the teacher in the access class I took last 
> year. 
> Last month I thought I'd give back to the open source community by 
> buying one of the commercially available products.
> Sounds good right?
> In this case it went horribly wrong.
> 
> I purchased the full version and the runtime from 'theKompany' and 
> things seemed ok until I got into the thick of it and couldn't get 
> things to work.
> It just didn't seem 'finished'.. so I went on the internet looking for 
> an answer.
> 
> That is when I realized that the version that theKompany is selling is 
> from 2003! 
> There were no warnings/disclaimers on their site, no clue whatsoever 
> that I was buying an ancient version anywhere prior to purchase.
> I sent several emails to the company before I purchased, they replied 
> but never disclosed that important information.
> 
> After a little searching on Google I found the open source site that you 
> can download the current version from ( http://rekallrevealed.org )
> and downloaded the source for linux, compiled it, and ran that instead 
> and my problems went away.
> Thats when it got interesting.  I sent an email to theKompany asking for 
> the current version. 
> They said that it wasn't a high selling product and wasn't a high 
> priority but they'd get around to it.
> 
> After much searching around I found out that their rights to the product 
> ended with version 2.2 in 2003, the current version is 2.4.
> They don't according to the author in the UK have the right to 
> distribute the current version.
> To get the new version I have to buy it from http://totalrekall.co.uk. 
> The new version works fairly well but the project is a no-go without 
> windows runtimes to run it on their windows machines.
> 
> theKompany/Shawn Gordon won't refund the purchase - they're taking the 
> stance 'you downloaded it, you bought it'.
> I've never dealt with such an unethical company in my life!
> Anyone else had an experience like this?
----
that's standard fare when you buy software whether it has origins or not
in open source. Generally the companies that sell proprietary software
continue to develop it and sell any 'improvements' as well as bug fixes
to their purchasers. Generally, a software purchase is the ability to
buy an upgrade to the next version which has some of the bugs fixed that
were irking you at a reduced price.

Obviously you weren't clued in to the relationship between theKompany
and the open source developers of rekall. I generally subscribe to the
mailing list before I invest time in a software project to see who is
using it and what questions are being asked. I currently am subscribed
to gnue.org - open-Xchange mail lists and haven't even begun active
installations...only contemplated them. 

Anyway, I am getting prepped to do something in the db realm and I was
looking at rekall and wondered about that but I want probably what
everyone wants...rapid development, attractive user interface toolkit
that runs on Windows and Linux (possibly just Linux) and maybe MacOS and
obviously stores in something like pgsql and I keep thinking the only
answer is gnue

Craig


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