Gaining points from freeware on RapidShare

[rapier]

I have read your rules, searched the forums, and still have something I would like to bring up because I did not find the same subject previously covered. You do cover almost everything else I could possibly ask so I am happy that I have joined this forum.

Hopefully, this is not a problematic post. I hate to bring up things that bother me on a first post but... I have been finding a lot of people posting freeware, without any special mods or packaging, on RapidShare. My assumptionis that they are trying to rack up points to get a free Premium account.

What do you members think of this? It bothers me when people do this as much as when people create warez links.

I have used scumvm before and give it my highest praises so I was prompted to post in this forum because I don't like it if someone else is profiting off of work that is freely available.

An example I ran across is at this link:

Code: Select all

http://www.inethouse.info/user/onuon/2006/07/10/scummvm_0_9_0/#1

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Oh, thanks for the great forum. I'm going to read throught the more recent posts after I post this.[/code]

[eriktorbjorn]

What do you members think of this? It bothers me when people do this as much as when people create warez links.

I'm no lawyer, but I would guess that as long as it still contains the original license, along with the relevant parts of the copyright information and documentation, it should satisfy the requirements of the GPL. The RapidShare points would probably be the "fee for the physical act of transferring a copy".

I don't know what rules and regulations RapidShare imposes on its users, though.

[Ender]

Well, theres nothing really wrong with it in my opinion.
In this case they are just redistributing our official releases (with licence and readme intact), which is fine. And sometimes the SourceForge download servers -can- be a pain in the arse :)

Of course, the #1 fundemental rule of downloading - I would never ever recommend anybody download ScummVM or related software from a link not on our homepage.

For example, that rapidshare links to a .rar containing a windows installer... which could, of course, always have been infected by a virus or have been repackaged with spyware (now -that- would annoy us :). It didn't, but it could.