Sourceforge is hosting a bogus Tiny Core project.

[roberts]

I don't  think my emails to Sourceforge were out of line, and in fact they are very factual. Sourceforge could have easily corrected this. They instead blew me off.

I have a big problem with the policy. Allow anything and thus make valid projects suffer. Most developer project sites, have a waiting period, so they can validate that there is not an existing project.

I do not want to promote bad conduct, but imagine, with Sourceforge's policy if we all went there and regsitered Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse, Mint, Knoppix, Puppy, etc., with each of our names as the "maintainer". Just upload and iso, click on donate, Viola!  Look at my cool project.

Now do you get the picture? Sourceforge need to change their policy. Their policy promotes bad conduct.

Do you think those projects would agree with you and Sourceforge's policy?  Sourceforge should respect  the FOSS community that they proport to support.

[andrewb]

I normally try to give people the benefit of the doubt, however, in this case I find that very difficult
considering this cut and paste from the overview page.

                     Tiny Core Linux by grimaldo

[EDIT]: In my opinion this is a claim of authorship.

& here is a reply I got from 'grimaldo' via sourceforge (In reply to an email to him pointing out he could not claim to be the developer of TC:

"I've made no claims, just posted a couple images. What is the problem? Are the images I posted not open source? Not GPL Licensed? What is is?"

My reply to this was:

> You should have consulted the TC development team before setting up
> the Sourceforge site. It is not helpful to have two competing sites
> for the same project. In particular new users will be confused as to
> where to go for authoritative information & help. TC has flourished
> incredibly well under it's exiting hosting arrangements. Your action
> will merely fragment & dilute the project, to the detriment of users &
> developers.

to which I got the reply:

not if they read the text on the site.
sorry you're not happy, but I have my reasons. If you'd like to be a little less hostile I might be willing to discuss more. Are you a TC developer?

my reply:

No - not a developer, but I have contributed documentation to the wiki & did contribute to the predecessor of TC (DamnSmallLinux). i.e. I have been following & using this project for a long time & don't like to see it treated this way. This shows you are annoying  the users, never mind the developers, of this project.

[roberts]

As I said my issue is with more with Sourceforge for allowing such conduct.
I don't believe that Sourceforge would allow such to be done to the major distributions.

[thane]

I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of free software, but even if there's no copyright/trademark violation what grimaldo is doing seems like a kind of plagiarism (which applies even to works in the public domain).

[gerald_clark]

The sourceforge web site link points to http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/
Roberts, maybe you should add a great big "By Robert Shingledecker" on that page.
That will add to the foolish factor of his sourceforge page.

[danielibarnes]

what grimaldo is doing seems like a kind of plagiarism

To which he replied:

I've made no claims, just posted a couple images.

Indeed, he does not claim to have authored Tiny Core. He created a "tinycore" project on SourceForge and is hosting the images there. The real (and valid) complaint is that users will be confused and think the SourceForge site is the real site.

To which he replied:

If you'd like to be a little less hostile I might be willing to discuss more.

I think grimaldo should avoid even the appearance of impropriety, but you can't force someone to be respectful of you or your work. Tiny Core is Robert's gem so let him handle it as he sees fit without interference.

As I said my issue is with more with Sourceforge for allowing such conduct.

I am sure hundreds, if not thousands of projects come and go on sourceforge daily. I would not expect a human to audit each one of those for violations when created let alone monitor them. It would be far too labor intensive. Their process for violations is simply to send proof to their legal department. They should take it from there.

[roberts]

I have sent proof to dmca@sourceforge.net

[tinypoodle]

Well, with his latest act of provocation that projects owner on sourceforge himself has definitely removed all benefits of a doubt:

Code: [Select]

Regardless, nothing is stolen. Those stating such silliness are recommended to read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond and to review the license granted by Mr. Shingledecker at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
After this, IMHO most blatant and provocative gpl violation has become an essential issue, as all the person does host are .isos and some metafiles which seem to contain just various checksums and url's; while the whole infrastructure of sourceforge is supposed to host  primarily source code.

Perhaps someone with a sourceforge account could challenge him to provide the sources of TC (on occasion I happened to find I could no longer log in into my account of many years) - e.g. in the same reviews section where he placed his statement: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinycorelinux/reviews

Looks more like "The Cathedral and the Thief" to me...  

[bmarkus]

SourceForge intention is to provide development ifrastructure for opensource project, like WEB site, SVN, trouble tricketing, mailing lists, etc. Usage as a file sharing server is legally within Terms and Conditions legally but for sure not in line with Geeknet's intention.

This is pitty to wast our time for such stupidity. You can't make a deal with him.

[thane]

Here's his latest:

"p.s. Due to the childishness of the administrators at the Tiny Core Forum I was banned as I attempted to post regarding this issue. I guess they don't want to hear from me, but they are willing to make fantastic assumptions. It would be one thing if I was abusing the forums, but I was just trying to respond to some libelous accusations. I never even posted once, and was banned as I typed. I can no longer recommend Tiny Core Linux due to unprofessional conduct of it's administration. Boothorn Distros will be changing the distro its ISO is based on for the next release...

posted by grimaldo 5 hours ago"

edit: This whole thing is getting some attention elsewhere (wonder who 'Anonymous' in the comments is though...)

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2011/03/tiny-core-fraud-on-source-forge.html

[roberts]

You mean the latest was grimaldo's removing of negative comments posted at Sourcegeforge on his tatics.

While the GPL certainly allows distributing binaries, doing so means that one must not rely on the upstream project.

It does not grant a license to commandeer the upstream's project name. This project on Sourceforge not only commandeered our project name, "Tiny Core Linux" by grimaldo,  but has numerous links upstream. It is a bogus project.

[dentonlt]

If there was a joint "this is a good will act" conversation, I might believe it was so.

But I don't see any, so to me it looks like domain name parking.

I vote for trade mark registration.

[tinypoodle]

Looks like there is a relation to
http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/sfnet_boothorn/releases/
where iso's and metafiles - besides from TC of a plethora of operating systems - seem to be hosted since earlier dates...

[bmarkus]

Hey my comments are just deleted at SF. Shit. Shame on SF.

[roberts]

It is in process.  Tiny Core Linux TM Pending.