Launchpad itself

A continuous violation of LP's "Terms of use" by the Subdownloader project

Asked by PhobosK

The offending project is: Subdownloader -
https://launchpad.net/subdownloader

They are offering the app with GNU GPL v3 license but at the same time they do charge their Windows users 15 euros. The problem is they still continue to host the Windows shareware binaries on Launchpad and answer registration bugs/answers problems, though someone of you the Launchpad admins had already contacted them about the problem long long ago (3 years ago to be precise):
https://answers.launchpad.net/subdownloader/+question/52299#comment-17

The Windows binaries are here:
https://launchpad.net/subdownloader/+download
(https://launchpad.net/subdownloader/trunk/2.0.13/+download/SubDownloader-2.0.13.exe)
and they are enlisted on their home page too:
http://www.subdownloader.net/
Here is one of the questions regarding the registration of Windows shareware:
https://answers.launchpad.net/subdownloader/+question/217467

All this has been going on for quite a long time (as you can see from the above discussion in question 52299) and is in direct violation (and it looks like an intentional act on part of the main developer of the project) of your Terms of service (https://help.launchpad.net/Legal/ProjectLicensing):
"- It must not require royalty payments or any other fee for redistribution or modification."
"- It must not discriminate against persons, groups or against fields of endeavour. The licence of software hosted by Launchpad can not discriminate against anyone or any group of users and cannot restrict users from using the software for a particular field of endeavour - a business for example."
"- It must not be distributed under a licence specific to one operating system. The rights attached to the software must not depend on the programme's being part of Ubuntu, for example."

I hope you will take the necessary measures to keep Launchpad free of
such deliberate violations of terms.

Thanks.

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Kapis
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Revision history for this message
Laura Czajkowski (czajkowski) said : 		#1

As I said last week when you contacted me directly via email we were looking into it and we have contacted the project in question. We will have a timeframe for this to be completed.

Also There is no such thing as a Launchpad Council.

Revision history for this message
Best Kapis (capiscuas) said : 		#2

Hi Laura,

we apologize for having that incident so long without resolving, we have inmediately removed all the Shareware binaries out of Launchpad servers and removed all the Questions refering to the licenses that some users mistakenly ask us here instead to our private email.

We are strong believers of FOSS and that's why we our software was released as dual license (GPLv3 & Shareware version) from the beggining, instead of just Shareware.

We thank you for reminding us of our mistake here and we'd be glad to know other concerns of any breeches of LP terms in the future if they occur, we hope not.

BTW. New versions of the full open source version of Subdownloader will come out soon :-)

P.S. Thanks to you too PhobosK ;-)

Revision history for this message
PhobosK (phobosk) said : 		#3

Thanks Ivan Garcia, that solved my question.