Simple Mobile Tools is dead, long live FossifyX!
Simple Mobile Tools is dead, long live FossifyX!
As reported in a reddit post and confirmed in a github discussion, Simple Mobile Tools is being sold to ZippoApps which is known for shady business practices.
It is not yet clear whether they will make the app suite closed source (which would infringe the rights of all contributors since they contributed under the GPLv3 license).
In response to that situation, one of the main contributors forked the project under the name FossifyX and will continue to work on it.
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This is open source at its best: the original developer somehow decided to sell out to the dark side and someone rescued the projects within a couple of days. Brillant!
And thank goodness for that too: I used SMT Calendar but Etar misses a couple of features I really need that would make it a good replacement, so I'll be sure to install FossifyX Calendar as soon as F-Droid picks it up.
I dunno much about these licenses but is it possible the new owners could nullify the GPL rights? Like "no you can no longer fork this code that you could previously"?
Just trying to figure out exactly what their motive is here...
(IANAL)
Since the software is already distributed under the terms of the GPLv3 (which guarantees irrevocable rights) there is no way to forbid any distribution of the current version of the software.
It is however possible to distribute future works under a different license, but only if you aren't bound by the GPL yourself. This would be the case if you wrote the code yourself or all contributors grant you the right to do so (eg. using a Contributor License Agreement).
There are clever ways to split software via different abstractions that allow to avoid some license features from affecting future developments too. That is to add new closed source features without relicensing the existing codebase.
Once someone exists publicly as code with an attached valid license it cannot be retroactively removed the right to use it. So only new versions could have different licenses or something.
the original developer somehow decided to sell out to the dark side
It's pretty ungrateful to frame someone who developed and provided software for free for a long time as a sellout.
Well no, it's factual: the man very generously did invaluable work for years. And then he sold out. That's just what happened, however grateful I am to him for the work he did for all those years.
I assume there were no other companies willing to buy Simple Mobile Tools, otherwise he wouldn't have sold to that particularly hateful bunch of sumbitches. One doesn't provide free tools with total abnegation for so many years and then choose the worse possible buyer this side of the law without a good reason. So I accept his choice and his reasons - whatever they may be.
But surely there were other ways to handle this. Like for example, telling the community that money has run out and he will be forced to sell to unsavory characters, and appealing to the community to fund him if they wanted to keep Simple Mobile Tools ads-free. But instead, he went about it all hush-hush and sprang it on everybody - users and contributors alike. Not cool.
Finally, remember that some people actually paid for their copies of Simple Mobile Tools, and they paid precisely to prevent this happening. They must feel pretty betrayed, and rightfully so.
he is selling his app suite to a comany known to ruin apps with trackers and ads, making the simple mobile tools suite no longer simple, but just another app in the ocean of crap. Also he likely violated liscences doing so
he could have at least sold to a better company, and considered the wishes of his fellow contributers as he have should according to his liscence
Some folks seem to forget this feature of open source when it comes to projects like Chromium. History has plenty of examples of forks of small and large projects. Chromium (Blink) itself is one.