An Open Letter: Notification of copyright infringement to Abaakouk Mehdi
Update: The Listen website has been temporarily taken down, and Abaakouk Mehdi is in the process of fixing the copyright notices. I am very grateful for this. In my mind, this issue is finished; we'll soon see a new release of Listen, with intact copyright notices, and everyone wins.

(But first second, a brief open letter to people who leave anonymous comments calling me an ass: The only tool free software developers have to defend themselves is their copyright. Copyright infringement is not a "minor problem" but the single largest mistake you can make when writing free software. When you take my work, and strip my name from it, and plasters yours all over it, I have every legal and ethical right to be as pissed about it as I want. I love it when people use my code. I see no reason to love it when people misrepresent my code. Without the ability to pursue copyright infringement, I might as well be writing public domain code, and in that case, I might as well be getting paid for helping software hoarders, and screw you all. Abaakouk screwed up, really badly, but you guys who don't want me to enforce my license are a real threat to free software.)

Dear Abaakouk Mehdi, author of "Listen, just listen,"

Your program is ugly. But beyond that, it's infringing upon my copyright and that of my friends. Your mmkey support, on-screen display, config.py, stock.py, much of your utils.py, and probably more but because I'm already angry enough I'm going to stop looking, is taken directly from my audio player, Quod Libet.

Normally, that's fine. It's free software. Enjoy the source. You didn't credit any of our work on the website. That's fine; it just makes you an asshole, albeit a law-abiding one. But you had to go one step further and rip off most of the copyright notices. You also licensed all the code under "GNU GPL v2 or later". You can't do that. Quod Libet's source is released under the GNU GPL, version 2.

My one consolation is your complete incompetence. I mean, it's really obvious from your screenshots that you ripped off our OSD, and you even left in the horrendous Python style guideline violations that we've since fixed. You copied and didn't use a lot of our utility functions (and you didn't copy and reimplemented improperly a few others). You left in half my comments, but then translated some docstrings. And to cap it off, you authenticate yourself to leoslyrics.com as auth=QuodLibet.

Remove my code from your shit, until you can learn how to properly, and legally, credit people.

View/comment on this post in my journal.