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Old 04-23-2004, 05:46 PM  
Dumpa
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 6
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I just found this on download.com (one of the user reviews)

"Overpriced, poorly architected, calls home - BEWARE"
Orwell. 1984. I'll bet the person Orwell imagined as the head of dastardly cabal to control all of our actions would be exacly the author of FlashFXP, Charles DeWeese. This program does call home, and does various undocumented things with the network [I've seen packets I can't explain to IPs that I don’t know of]. DeWeese and his cabal of privacy invaders insist they are protecting their intellectual property, but there is evidence that they have used open source code from the public domain that isn’t under the BSD license. One must call into question why having a GUI for something so trivial. And between the major P2P networks, Usenet and IRC servers, I don’t see couriers of 'warez' using this to do dumps. The model is simple: A GUI for amalgamating things that are already implemented atomically. The result is a GUI, that does various things rather nicely but it’s a sugar coating for bad medicine. The recent tactics of Microsoft and "activation" are similar to this: They are willing to punish paying customers to prevent the unpreventable - the theft of intellectual property. But just as Microsoft got it start on the Altair with BASIC, a language they didn’t invent, FlashFXP takes various queues from open source software, including other win32 applications, and then forces the buyer to accept the unacceptable: DeWeese wants to brand you like a cow; and they have revoked licenses without cause to people before. People like this want to turn you computer into a VCR, an appliance, with a XBOX-like signing mechanism or a VCR/DVD Macrovision or Palladium or Pentium serial numbers where they are trying desperately to manipulate and own your computer to prevent intellectual theft that they think occurs. These are the people that want to rent your software, to tithe you slowly, like a tick or a leech, they want the egress rate of your blood to be slow enough for you not to notice. And let's face it - no real programmers get jobs making FTP GUI clients. That's not a real job. In fact, I can think of several people who have real jobs that do complicated works of engineering that is worth money as a full time job seem to have enough spare cycles to contribute to open-source software such as FreeBSD or GNU or the Linux kernel. You are basically subscribing to a DeWeese get-rich-quick scheme, this is a hobbyist's program pawned off at a fascinatingly high price (to think that this thing costs over 10% of what Windows XP as a whole OS costs, think of that!) Hope any buyers of FlashFXP like subsidizing things that are marginally meritorious at rates far above justifiable. Like William Wallace in Braveheart, SCREAM "freedom" from this tyrannic opression and say no to FlashFXP."


I don't get it, you pay once and get lifetime upgrades...
And all of that for $25...

It seems more than fair to me...
Dumpa is offline