A-EON Technology Acquires Personal Paint

[Linde]

So what your saying is, if cloanto decided to remove their software from Aminet. They are not allowed to? So you own the software?

They are of course allowed to ask, but I can see no legal basis for its removal, given the license it was distributed under. Aminet is not their site.

I'm mostly with biggun here. It's great to see the continued development of PPaint, but asking to for existing versions from Aminet to be removed seems like a bad move.

Here is the license, if anyone is interested: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=EBjy10KY

[Linde]

And still people rage and complain rather than congratulate them for doing something that benefits all of us.

There is plenty of room for both. You should avoid mixing them up. Critique against trying to clean the freeware version off the internet is no the same as critique against the continued development of PPaint. In the same vein, praise for the continued development is not the same thing as praise for them asking for their files to be removed from Aminet.

So it is not very productive to think of A-EON/Cloanto as the worst thing that could happen to the Amiga, like some seem to do, and it is not very productive to tell the people who complain about the removal of the freeware version that they should shut up and stop complaining for reasons totally unrelated to the complaint.

[Linde]

+1 for OS X version, though it might seem like an unlikely development.

@som99

As far as I know, 7.1c was the only version released for free on Aminet. I posted the license of that on page 6. It's very hard to read, since it mixes all-caps legal stuff with informal and vague descriptions of your liabilities, some of which can be disregarded completely (like the 10k euro fairy tale), but the way I read it you have no rights to distribute it without a "prior written license". I don't know whether that refers to the terms described in the license included with the archive itself or to some separate distribution contract, but supposedly the former, in which case it's all right to host it.

[Linde]

No copyright software should ever be distributed without a valid licence.

The question here then is if the readme file included in the archive constitutes such a license, and if not, what license did "Aminet internet archives" (whatever organization or person that means) agree to? They should have had a lawyer write this thing.

PPaint has never been freeware

I beg to differ, at least by any common definition of freeware. The software was distributed free of charge. Freeware. That's not to say that this makes any difference legally when it comes to copyright.