This is totally absurd. jhickner is right. Nick doesn't know /anything/ about copyright or licensing. I wonder how obviously dumb something needs to be before you don't have to pay a lot for a lawyer.
I also wonder if the Something Awful style defense would have stopped this. Leonard J. Crabs can be pretty convincing.
Worked for me - perhaps because I capitalised it as SimpleTip. Here's the message I sent him :>
Interesting that you gave Craig Thompson such a hard time over SimpleTip,
while having NO IDEA about how copyright works when applied to code.
Absolutely right about reputation, btw. If you want to be taken seriously
you should realize that showing your ability to be a pompous blowhard
is the worst kind of advertising you can have for yourself.
I don't know either of these people, but Nick clearly has no concept of how copyright actually works. The "result" of code is inherently a process, which isn't copyrightable. Only his verbatim source code is copyrightable.
The entire concept of reverse engineering rests on this distinction.
Wow, that's incredibly lame on Nick's part. If the API is the same, but the underlying code is completely different then that it not a 'port', or a derivative, that is a different product.
That's like saying a Macbook and a Viao both have a screen, keyboard and USB ports and so they're the same thing for licensing purposes... Unlikely.
I didn't realize qTip was the successor to simpleTip.
I've been using it in all my projects, and find it much better than protoTip (especially since it runs in jquery, and is free)
Having been involved in litigation over copyright where we were 100% in the right but the other side had fundamental misconceptions about how copyright actually works I can understand why you'd just give up when threatened with legal action.
It took us a long time (about six months) and a considerable chunk of money in lawyers fees just to get them to go away - even though their case was totally groundless.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadI also wonder if the Something Awful style defense would have stopped this. Leonard J. Crabs can be pretty convincing.
Craig, please continue to distribute Simpletip. I see that you seem to know more about the licensing issues than Nick.
Edit: Removed my comment when I realized this story is over 1 year old...
Classy stuff.
(nick's site: http://www.nickstakenburg.com/)
EDIT: I can't seem to get it to happen again.
EDIT2: It was his site. http://i50.tinypic.com/166nh4z.jpg
The entire concept of reverse engineering rests on this distinction.
That's like saying a Macbook and a Viao both have a screen, keyboard and USB ports and so they're the same thing for licensing purposes... Unlikely.
It seems he moved on and cut his losses.
http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/
i wonder why the sandbox page was left up.
- those letters were in jan/2009
- there is now a project called qTip
- Nick is in the Netherlands, Craig is in the USA <- hard to sue someone in another country
- ProTip is still at version 2, apparently Nick never got around to doing v3
It took us a long time (about six months) and a considerable chunk of money in lawyers fees just to get them to go away - even though their case was totally groundless.