Unscrupulous selling of open source software

[steve]

Audacity is not the only great open source software product to suffer from this malpractice.

I recently came across 3DMagix and Blender where someone is selling "3D Animation Studio Pro Software" accompanied by some tutorials. The software is of course the well know Blender 3D design and animation application, which is open source and freely available for download from http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

I think it would be perfectly fair and reasonable if 3DMagix were just selling their tutorials and gave full credit to the open source software, but they don't. Their advertisements state "Create 3D Animations Easily and Download 3D Computer Animation Software With Video Training + Tutorials" and although the name "Blender" IS displayed on their web site, there is NO indication that it is a free and open source program.

As the 3DMagix web site feature numerous images by talented computer artists WITHOUT CREDIT TO THE ARTISTS, I very much doubt that the tutorials are the original work of the 3DMagix organisation/person. My bet is they are directly ripped from the extensive on-line help that is available (FREE) on the Blender web site ( Free 3D modeling and animation tutorials from Blender )

Unfortunately such dubious practices are often kept at the fringes of legality so as to afford them a degree of immunity from prosecution. The best that we can do is to give the "deserved publicity" to both these wonderful open source projects and to the rip-off merchants that exploit them for their own selfish ends.

If you use and enjoy Audacity and have a web site or a blog, why not support the team with a link or two.
Audacity, the free, easy-to-use editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux

[adriaya]

How easy is it to get open source software projects funded? If there is a gap in the open source software world for a particular application/system, is it generally possible to find companies/public organisations to help fund the creation of that project if someone is willing to coordinate / manage the project? Does anyone have any examples of projects initiated in this way? I'm thinking of a scale of project larger than a Google summer of code.
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