Should it be any shock they never
released this application? Your probably
right though, nothing to hide on their part and clearly nothing was stolen in
this coverup which resulted in no application being released.
Update: MediaPortal
Responds! According to them: “To be clear, these parts are gfx only and NOT code. The reason this happened
is because during development we borrowed the gfx layout of webguide4 with the
intention to replace all the gfx with MP's own ones before releasing.” You can be your own judge based on the code below.
Update 3: Before commenting, remember that no one from
MediaPortal has contacted Doug or replied to his e-mails as of 04/04/2007 at 1
pm CST.
Yesterday I posted about the possibility that MediaPortal
might have just ripped off WebGuide4 by Doug Berrett. Today, thanks to everyone we
find out that this looks like it's sadly true. From the looks of things MediaPortal’s code looks very
much like Doug’s from WebGuide4,
a non-open source product.
It started out noticing how similar the graphics were, and
in fact the exact same UI design is in both products. Both are said to use the same web server
components, Cassini or IIS. Interesting
thing about that is that Cassini does not yet work with MediaPortal’s stolen
version, where it is the default with WebGuide4 (according to forum
posts). Not sure what happened there,
but Cassini and IIS are pretty major web servers for ASP.NET so it’s hard to
claim it was stolen based on that alone.
Attack of the Clones!
Then last night, MediaPortal strangely took
down there post about “Webinterface for tvserver3” as well as the Wiki docs (Google
Cache) on their website. The post can
now be found via Google's
Cache, and the original
story now says “You are not authorized to view this resource.”
Thanks to Mashman for doing the basic research and finding
the SVN link at SourceForge. Here we can even see that the MediaPortal
guys left the WebGuide4 images in the directories! What better way to get caught then to have
images of the original work in your stolen copy. wg4-logo-silver.png
and wg4-logo-silver-big.png
are just two of the exact images stolen from WebGuide4 but it doesn’t stop with
images.
One of the great things about open source is that you can download
the code and take a look at it. Doug has
both copies of the code (his WebGuide4 and MediaPortal’s stolen) and had
compared the two.
The results are not good so far. According to Berrett, the “coincidences in
the code… make me suspicious.”
Here are some samples before, in my non-programmer opinion I
can still see the similarities very well.
Doug’s WebGuide3/4:*
If pt.Text.Length > len(cell_width) + 3 Then pt.Text = pt.Text.Substring(0,
len(cell_width) - 3).Trim & "…"
MediaPortal’s “Version”:
if
(length != program.Title.Length) title = program.Title.Substring(0, length - 3)
+ "...";
Doug’s WebGuide3/4:*
tooltip
= Me.Attributes("title") & "
" & start_time.ToLocalTime.ToShortTimeString & " - " &
end_time.ToLocalTime.ToShortTimeString & IIf(Me.Attributes("description")
<> "",
vbCrLf, "")
& Me.Attributes("description")
MediaPortal’s “Version”:
cellBase.Attributes.Add("title",
String.Format("{0} {1}-{2}\r\n{3}", program.Title,
program.StartTime.ToShortTimeString(), program.EndTime.ToShortTimeString(),
program.Description));
This is a sad day for MediaPortal. Such a great project and stealing code
directly from other developers without any notice or question. Taking the same concept and building your own
version is fine, using the exact same code as another developer without permission
is not.
We get questions all the time at The Green Button on what other products
can be used instead of Media Center, so much for ever suggesting MediaPortal
again.
On the plus side, it look like the claimed author of the
infringing code (“yamp”), is not an official
MediaPortal Team Member. Hopefully
this incident will teach the official members to double check code before making
public statements on new features and releases.
Hopefully the MediaPortal Team will respond to this issue as
soon as possible.
*Code posted with permission of Doug Berrett.
Digg
it!
Updates: They deleted all the images from /trunk/TvEngine3/MPWebGuide/MPGuide/images/. Click here
for an image of what it looked like before they deleted them. The
two noted files are of the WebGuide4 logo.
MediaPortal
Responds! According to them: “To be clear, these parts are gfx only and NOT code. The reason this happened
is because during development we borrowed the gfx layout of webguide4 with the
intention to replace all the gfx with MP's own ones before releasing.”
You can be your own judge based on the code above.
Update 3: Before commenting, remember that no one from
MediaPortal has contacted Doug or replied to his e-mails as of 04/04/2007 at 1
pm CST.
Note: Original title read “MediaPortal Steals Code from WebGuide4
Developer”. Changed to reflect known
facts and too try and get MediaPortal supporters to answer my questions,
instead of avoid and ignore them. I’ll digress
on the code for now.
Should it be any shock they never
released this application? Your probably
right though, nothing to hide on their part and clearly nothing was stolen in
this coverup which resulted in no application being released.
var dc_UnitID = 14;
var dc_PublisherID = 11967;
var dc_AdLinkColor = '6699cc';
var dc_adprod='ADL';
Cross Posted from Chris Lanier's Blog at
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/