Re-selling Blender? (Illusionmage and 3Dmagix fraud/scam)
Nov 30, 2016 17:45:52 GMT
NicusorN5, Power Supersport, and 1 more like this
Post by DedTed on Nov 30, 2016 17:45:52 GMT
What's up guys?
I found an ad...
It was of a CG software called Illusionmage.
It looked quite similar to Blender, plus it was paid. I clicked away.
Few months later I found something...
Something that would explain why it was so similar to Blender...
IT'S AN OPEN SOURCE LEECH!!
Yes friends. This is no joke or nightmare.
This company is taking advantage of Blender being open source and making money out of Blender foundation's hard work.
Softwares like Illusionmage, 3Dmagix, miragemage are all open source leeches. This thread was made to disclose this fact.
This is what the chairman said about this:
The companies IllusionMage and 3Dmagix resell via their websites Blender under their own name. Both websites are probably managed by the same person or company.
On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don’t remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images – not even from blender – were copied from various CG websites.
Rebranding and re-distributing GNU GPL software is a key right. This doesn’t give the right to then also rebrand the credits, claims and artwork as created with Blender.
The sad thing is especially that people are being lured in with the suggestion that this is a cracked version Autodesk 3D Max. Their customers probably feel too ashamed after purchasing this product to complain really…
But what can we do? Not much really… lawyers will be a waste of money on this. Best is as usual to just publicize this well. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” as a U.S. Supreme Court judge once said.
The Chinese Blender community pointed us at 3DMofun, a company in China abusing Blender – claiming they made this software themselves, removing every Blender credit from the UI, not crediting Blender translations, images and DVD contents… all with the aim of getting government funding for 3D education. They are shamelessly removing credits.
A little screen shot...
Here’s a full report of by the BlenderCN community about this.Chinese Blender community
Only the software download via their BBS (incomplete download) still has the original GPL credit and Blender names.
Apart from ‘naming and shaming’ we can’t do much yet now… see below.
Visit the very supportive Chinese Blender community Blender community for more information, or help them!
Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation
Sources : www.katsbits.com/smforum/index.php?topic=215.0
www.blender.org/press/re-branding-blender/
Don't just sit there idle! We all gotta do something about this!
SPREAD THE WORD!
I found an ad...
It was of a CG software called Illusionmage.
It looked quite similar to Blender, plus it was paid. I clicked away.
Few months later I found something...
Something that would explain why it was so similar to Blender...
IT'S AN OPEN SOURCE LEECH!!
Yes friends. This is no joke or nightmare.
This company is taking advantage of Blender being open source and making money out of Blender foundation's hard work.
Softwares like Illusionmage, 3Dmagix, miragemage are all open source leeches. This thread was made to disclose this fact.
This is what the chairman said about this:
The companies IllusionMage and 3Dmagix resell via their websites Blender under their own name. Both websites are probably managed by the same person or company.
On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don’t remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images – not even from blender – were copied from various CG websites.
Rebranding and re-distributing GNU GPL software is a key right. This doesn’t give the right to then also rebrand the credits, claims and artwork as created with Blender.
The sad thing is especially that people are being lured in with the suggestion that this is a cracked version Autodesk 3D Max. Their customers probably feel too ashamed after purchasing this product to complain really…
But what can we do? Not much really… lawyers will be a waste of money on this. Best is as usual to just publicize this well. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” as a U.S. Supreme Court judge once said.
The Chinese Blender community pointed us at 3DMofun, a company in China abusing Blender – claiming they made this software themselves, removing every Blender credit from the UI, not crediting Blender translations, images and DVD contents… all with the aim of getting government funding for 3D education. They are shamelessly removing credits.
A little screen shot...
Here’s a full report of by the BlenderCN community about this.Chinese Blender community
Only the software download via their BBS (incomplete download) still has the original GPL credit and Blender names.
Apart from ‘naming and shaming’ we can’t do much yet now… see below.
Visit the very supportive Chinese Blender community Blender community for more information, or help them!
Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation
Sources : www.katsbits.com/smforum/index.php?topic=215.0
www.blender.org/press/re-branding-blender/
Don't just sit there idle! We all gotta do something about this!
SPREAD THE WORD!
