A heads-up for those who may be purchasing a Stream Deck payware plug-in from a site named Flight Deck. A developer named Nguyen Quy Hy, who's plugins are freely available, claims some people stole his plugins from GitHub, and packaged them as Flight Deck, with some pre-built profiles. I purchased the payware from this site, on a recommendation from a fellow simmer from Avsim, who was also unaware of the controversy. I thought  I was supporting the work of developer, Nguyen Quy Hy, but the funds went to those who supposedly stole his work. As I am not an attorney, I can not speak to whatever legal or ethical issues may be involved here, but if you wish to support the work of Nguyen Quy Hy on GitHub it seems you should not purchase the payware version available on the internet.

 

Edited August 1, 20214 yr by Bosco19
spelling

3 minutes ago, Bosco19 said:

A heads-up for those who may be purchasing a Stream Deck payware plug-in from a site named Flight Deck. A developer named Nguyen Quy Hy, who's plugins are freely available, claims some people stole his plugins from GitHub, and packaged them as Flight 

Thank you for the heads up - appreciate it 

on his Github page, the license is indicated as GPL v3, which means it IS allowed to take that work, modify it AND charge for it.

The only requirement is those selling the product should make their modifications available in source code format too and they cannot place their derived product on a more restrictive license. Which means the commercial Flight Deck plugin IS also licensed under GPL v3.

So, as long the ones selling the derived product will release their modifications in source code, they haven’t done anything wrong.

However, this relates only to the program source code. What they are REALLY selling are the custom profiles they made, and these are DATA so, not only they are allowed to sell them but, they are not forced to release as GPL.

If they modified the program code to add extra features required by their custom profiles, they would be required to publish the modified source code under GPL, but not the actual profiles.

Edited August 1, 20214 yr by virtuali

Thanks for that clarification. I am not a programmer. As I understand it, other people are allowed to appropriate code posted on GitHub and develop it further. Is it considered "uncool" to take the work of others from there and use it for commercial purposes, even though it is legal?