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I have been reading it and so far I cannot say the writer of the info at your mentioned link has many things to say that actually holds.



YMMV.

It's pretty clear that early versions of g4l were copied from g4u, but less clear that any g4u code remains in g4l at the moment. Of course, even removing the infringing code later doesn't absolve g4l's developer(s).

g4u's a solid product, in any case--I use it to image and deploy the machines in my lab.

I agree that g4u is a great product, and I made a $20 donation to the author when I started using it. My College had a Ghost site license, but it then failed with disks with LVM partition, and Symantec was of no help. Found g4u, and it worked fine. Only problem I had was when trying to image a full classroom of machines at the same time, it would usually have about 25% of the machines fail. Later tired g4l, and it never had the problem with the ftp. Since then, I generally use udpcast, which is even better for doing many machines.

g4l was completely rewritten not too long ago, so I imagine that they were indeed addressed.

i hope so.

however, if it were done by the same persons that did the thieving in the first place, i dont care, im not gonna use it

That article just doesn't hold water. So what if the code was copied?

From the code comparisons as well, they just don't map one to one in a convincing way.

What's worse in my eyes is that I placed g4u under an Open Source license. Not the GPL everyone seems so fond of nowadays, but the BSD License which I find easier to understand and follow - and which protects software authors' intellectual property equally well.

So would he prefer it if a company took his code, started using it in their own products, started selling it and gave him no credit? That's what the BSD license implies.

Edited 2007-01-12 14:29

I wish I could say that it was 100% resolved, but I've had some emails with the G4U author, but haven't gotten a complete reply. The original version was definitely based on the G4U scripts, but I must point out that the copyright information was only on the web site, and not in the scripts or diskette. At least not the ones I had seen. The original author did a translation of it to work with linux. Unfortunately, I never saw those first authors versions, and only saw the second authors last version (0.14) which very different from the original g4u scripts. It was over 2000 lines with a text gui. With the exception of user dd and ftp the programs don't share any direct code, and don't believe anyone but the original dd author could take credit for that. Basically both g4u and g4l are dd piping compression ftp.

The g4u/g4l copyright page hasn't been changed in almost 2 years now, so I wish I could say it has died but basically it still obviously pops up now and then.