Not too long ago I received a letter from a William P. Kealy of Stuart & Branigin, LLP which you can see to the right, but for readability I've copied the contents into the text below:
"Re: drunkenblog.comDear Mr. Bell,
Stuart & Branigin represents Maui X-Stream, Inc. (MXS)
On Thursday, April 14, you phoned me. You refused to disclose your business address.
MXS customers report that you have contacted them. Those customers attribute to you statements about MXS and its products that are false. Speaking untruths to a third party is slander. A slanderer is liable for damages resulting from the slander. MXS's investigation to date gives MXS cause to believe that slanders by you have caused MXS to lose sales. MXS has authorized me to investigate legal action against you for those damages.
Please provide me immediately a list of MXS customers contacted by you and the dates on which the contacts occurred. Please also supply me the name of your counsel.
Very truly yours,
William P. Kealy"
It often takes me awhile to get stuff at the addy in my WHOIS, but I get it eventually just because of occassions like this. We'll get to my specific response to it in a bit, but for now let's just say one benefit to a video blog is that rude gestures don't translate in quite the same way via text.
Now, you may be curious as to why a company named Maui X-Stream (MXS) has a problem with me to the point where they're essentially telling me they're trying to figure out how to sue me, they happen to be the company that birthed CherryOS upon the world. CherryOS is the PowerPC emulator specifically geared for running Mac OS X on Windows machines, and detailing the claims regarding it by it's creator -- along with the CEO -- would take an entire chapter by itself.
If you'll recall, awhile back I wrote The Pits in CherryOS, and several follow-ups, detailing and explaining the evidence that CherryOS was really code from the open-sourced PowerPC emulator PearPC, along with infringing code from numerous other open-sourced projects.
Readers, I can tell you that I have never contacted an MXS customer that I'm remotely aware of, especially before I got this letter. It's completely bogus, but oh yes I've been digging, and the problems seemed to have arised when they realized just how deeply I and others were going. In this post, we'll go through exactly what I have done in the last while regarding Maui X-Stream, along with:
- Their legal threats against those finding the evidence, and why DrunkenBlog had to get a lawyer.
- The evidence of infringing GPL and LGPL programs within their VX30 products. Programs like XviD, LAME, Media Player Classic, phpAdsNew, and more.
- How the evidence was gathered, and how you can verify it for yourself.
- My three hour chat with Arben Kryeziu regarding VX30, CherryOS, the evidence of infringing code in their other commercial product called VX30, and a whole bunch of other goofy behavior.
- Much, much more.
This isn't a Mac, Linux or Windows thing. This is an OSS thing, along with a liberal sprinkling of 'what the hell were they thinking'. Open Source is becoming increasingly important across all platforms and all types of software, and chances are the computer allowing you to read this has some floating around inside it.
When people often give their all to create the software we work on, play on, and more and more frequently practically live on, the fruits of those efforts should be respected and -- if it comes to it -- protected. This isn't zealotry, it is just becoming fundamental.
Because the length and scope of this post demands it, this is the first post on the site with anchored chapter-thingies for when you need to find your way back:
- A quick primer of licenses and copyrights
- The licenses we'll be specifically dealing with
- Laying out VX30
- The cost and customers of VX30
- A note regarding Maui Online
- The VX30 patents
- Getting to know Mr. Kartes
- The evidence in VX30
- The XviD code
- The Media Player Classic code
- The LAME code
- The SHOUTcast code
- The CFileDropListCtrl code
- The JPEG code
- More weird leftovers
- VX30 Ad-Stats and phpAdsNew
- Finding the code in VX30
- A Cease and Desist
- Verify for yourself, with mirrors
- My representation
- Questioning playerless-streaming.org
- Arben and Crystal Kryeziu
- Making friends
- My 3 hour chat with Arben
- Jim Kartes needs a blankey
- Pinging Arben
- The Comsdev connection
- Do not taunt Happy Khalid Farooq
- That PowerPC Emulator
- They can penetrate our borders, but they cannot reach Baghdad
- PDFConv and PDF2HTML
- Recent events
- Wrapping up
posted on May 10, 2005 at 06:37 AM
Just about everyone saw that CherryOS went "open source" the other day, but I didn't write about it because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, I'm working on something larger, and I was dealing with the ponce Brad Gibson over at MacObserver yet again.
Eweek and EPN caught the other shoe, where they basically say to ignore the GNU logo, they'll be releasing CherryOS under an open source license they've created themselves and charging $14.95. Oh, and all the evidence is a pack of lies.
This story is such a non-starter that I'm really kind of bored by this aspect of it. It should be obvious we're in for another round of rhyming history.
Early this morning I reached over someone to turn off the beeping noise and noticed my thumb hurt. I forgot about it until I realized holding my toothbrush really really hurt, and that the underside was red, raw, and practically had a little groove.
I also noticed a cracked bottle of ibuprofen next to the sink, so I can only surmise I tried to stave off what I knew would be a decent hangover by preemptively popping a few pills before crashing and didn't have the damn arrows on the bottle lined up. Judging by the stray pills on the floor, I'm also going to assume I gave up after awhile and just broke the bottle under my foot, took what I needed, and went to sleep.
Speaking of drunken ineptitude, if you get the G4 channel via cable, you can tune into Attack of the Show tonight at 7pm ET or 4pm PT and watch them demonstrate running Mac OS X on your PC via CherryOS. Every once in awhile someone asks me something along the lines of "Why on earth did Maui-X think they could get away with this?".
This type of thing, along with pieces like the one at MacObserver.com by Brad Gibson -- where he boils the evidence down to one sentence mentioning some forum post complaints -- is exactly why they'd think they'd have a shot. After crunching the numbers and demographics, it's not impossible to try to outrun the story and rake in some cash.
The above is what you get when you go to cherryos.com, and CherryOS has been removed from the list of products Maui-X sells. It's very amusing, but I wouldn't break out the party hats.
I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that this won't be the last these guys are heard of; they've sunk in too much time, money and effort into this endeavor to walk away without trying every angle they possibly can.
On March 29, 2005, Maui-X released "version 1.2" of CherryOS. It's only been a few days, but there are already some interesting bits floating out which I've added to the original The pits in CherryOS post.
Instead of making you wade through to the end of the evidence section I figured I'd include them here with some extra bits because it's probably the last time I'll write about this for awhile.
I added two more bits of evidence of evidence to The pits in CherryOS, one involving finding GPL'd code from another project (Cygwin), and one involving matching the code paths between CherryOS and PearPC:
'Profiling' the code paths of CherryOS appears to show it does... exactly the same thing that PearPC's code... even if they've changed some of the function names. If you stare at the below screenshots to see how things are connecting, you'll see it:The above is just an example, there's more at the source listed. (Source)
This one could get kind of confusing if you don't know what code paths are, so I wanted to try to break it down so non-geeks could have a better chance of grok'ing what's going on.
I made a few changes to the CherryOS post, including adding in another bit of amusing evidence, making a clarification, and changing the direct download link.
Regarding the clarification, it involved the part about MacWorld running a feature on CherryOS that for all intents and purposes was just its marketing bullet points.
Someone at MacWorld rightly pointed it was an article on their website, not their actual magazine, and that 'feature' was probably too strong of a word...
The site wasn't doing very well for awhile there, there's a particularly large boom going on with the Cherry OS post and with it a particularly large wall of traffic that hit.
It's also been updated (and will continue to be) with new evidence and links. It should be fine now in terms of speed, or at least not so slow as to be dead. (do notice the collection plate on your way out, papa needs a new hard drive)
It's worth noting -- because there has been some confusion in my inbox -- that I'm not affiliated with the PearPC project. If you search the blog you'll find some references, including some where I guessed that CherryOS was just PearPC, but there was little real hard data.
I became involved because a developer of PearPC mentioned what was going on to Pieter Van den Abeele of Gentoo Mac OS -- ostensibly about getting Gentoo PPC running on PearPC -- who posted it on his blog, and then contacted me.
Recently I had some very, very disturbing news passed onto me regarding what's going on with the product known as CherryOS.
There's been a lot of buzz about Cherry OS lately -- since they started actually selling their product -- but there are some real pits in Cherry OS, and the people behind it (MXS), that aren't getting enough attention.
This isn't about nitpicking marketing claims, we're going to be breaking down some really uncool stuff involving taking GPL-based code from PearPC (among other projects) and completely false performance claims being used to get people to hand over their cash.
