Me and my team have a following problem. We have a small amount (7 at the moment) of free extensions published on MagentoConnect. Among them there are 2, which we suspect being completely or partially stolen from us: ET IP Security and ET Advanced Compare. The first one is for restricting access to website and the second is for enhancing compare functionality.
And today I saw these relatively new extensions: IP Guard (IG) and Compare Ultimate (CU) both made by Arcanum Dev. One problem is that not only list of their features completely repeats ours, but even their screenshots resemble ours too much. Well, it is a pitty and we are alittle sad about that, but we could live with that alone - hell, our extensions are free, so it doesn’t really matter. However there are second problem, which concerns us much more than first one - ArcanumDev sells these extensions. And that we don’t like very much.
Both of our extensions are under AF L 3.0 licence. Well, we don’t have a lawer and we didn’t gave much thought for choose of licence. So I have a few questions to people who understand licences:
1) If we are right and ArcanumDev’s extensions contain our work, does AF L allows this?
2) If AF L allows this, what licence should we use to prevent that from happening in future?
3) Who defends developer’s copyright in Magento Connect? Is it MagentoConnect’s work to check extensions for such cases or developer must defend his work in court?
P.S. Dear ArcanumDev. If you’re reading this post, I can offer you some hot ideas for naming your next extensions: Currency Administrator (CA), Review Informer (RI) and Lytebox (well, i agree, there is no room for imagination here).
You can get it developed by Magento Developers which can be solely yours extension and I think it would cost low as compared to licensing fees and one advantage of Hiring Magento Professional Programmer is that you can get according to your need and can be used for as many years as you can.
