Expert VNC - An Independent Review

[Jessica Blank]

Not to be an annoyance, but shouldn't ANYONE trying to make $500 a pop
selling a fork of RealVNC immediately fall under suspicion of violating
the GPL? Folks who respect the GPL generally don't pull tricks like that.

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, William Hooper wrote:

> ben.blackmore@triumph-international.co.uk said:
> > I agree, expert users will probably be able to do much of what Expert VNC
> > offers themselves. I reviewed it only to help people with
> > their questions, and to get a better understanding of the product myself.
> >
> > The files that I executed were "viewerdemo.exe" 126kb and "serverdemo.exe"
> > 265kb, it appears these are compressed executables, that
> > launch the program, probably putting the files in a temporary directory,
> > not found where yet, but it creates a directory under 'c:\vnc'
> > however it only extracts a readme file to this directory.
> [snip]
>
> This is contrary to the statements made by Joel Bomgaars when asked about
> the license of ExpertVNC:
> "The scripts and executables of ExpertVNC that are completely separate
> files are licensed separately under a generic restrictive license."
> http://www.realvnc.com/pipermail/vnc-list/2003-May/039005.html
>
> >From your discription they are not seperate files, but part of the same
> executable.  As the GPL FAQ states:
> "If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are
> definitely combined in one program."
> http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
>
> This sounds like ExpertVNC is violating the GPL license of RealVNC.  I
> would suggest that RealVNC Ltd have a discussion with the people behind
> ExpertVNC and either state they are not violating the GPL or have
> ExpertVNC's license changed to GPL.
>
> --
> William Hooper
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