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Apology

PCMan, thank you for being gracious, and for inventing this product in the first place.

As far as the license goes, I realize the javascript comments are not sufficient, I was just pointing out that while we made mistakes, we were attempting to follow the GPL.

Regarding the GPL: I want to make sure we get this right, and it appears to me that we both still have to make some updates. From the gpl-violations.org web site, http://gpl-violations.org/faq/vendor-faq.html some of the common mistakes are:

* Only including a Link to the GPL license text, instead of a verbatim copy.
* Only including a download link to the source code, rather than a written offer to ship the source code on a physical storage medium customarily used for information interchange.

I think we both still have this wrong, what is your opinion?

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Now that we've settled the GPL concerns, let's move on to the concern about the developer account named "PCMan":

You guys weren't paying attention to what was happening at the time. So here's some history:

At the time things were very confusing for users. The original "IE Tab" had been abandoned and no longer worked (and still doesn't), so some new versions were created.

There was an extension named "IE Tab Plus", and the owners of the "IE Tab Plus" extension actually changed their name to "IE Tab" for a period. So there were two listings named "IE Tab". If you all had been paying attention at that time I guess we would have had a whole different controversy.

In any case, they changed their name to "IE Tab" and claimed they were "the original" IE Tab. Users were very confused. We could have _also_ changed the name of the "IE Tab 2" extension to "IE Tab", and then there would be three listings named "IE Tab". But we didn't think that would be very helpful to users and we had no desire to make things worse.

We were getting support requests for the _other_ IE Tab extensions and questions about which one was which. There were also spammers spamming our reviews (AMO actually fixed this later). Let me say now that when I decided to respond to user requests and do the work of fixing the abandoned "IE Tab", I had no idea it would become a headache like this!

At about the same time, we wanted an additional developer account, and the idea came to us to name it PCMan. Hey, guess what, AMO lets you do that! We thought it would help clarify for users which extension was based on the original, so we went for it.

It was a questionable marketing strategy, but it was allowed and the name was available, so we used it.

We didn't take any action to pretend we were "the" PCMan, we just had a developer account with the same name. Make of it what you will, but we didn't do _anything_ that would harm users. On the contrary, I think our actions were helpful to users by helping them pick the version of IE Tab that was more closely based on the original. And I could argue that it even does a better job of giving credit to PCMan for being the original author.

Now the owner of the first account named PCMan on AMO has come out of hiding and doesn't want users to be confused over which extension HE is working on. Well, welcome back! I wish you had just contacted me directly or replied to my emails, but we are where we are. We will let the new PCMan developer account go away and we removed it from the listing as soon as we discovered the objections. That seemed like a reasonable request to avoid confusion.

I think it's now obvious that this clever marketing strategy was a bad idea. And believe me, for that we are truly sorry.

Now let's go write some code.

BTW: Concerning the rewrite to ATL. I have also been bothered that this code base was old enough to still be using COM via MFC, but I just didn't have a chance to rewrite it yet. I fully intend to shortly since I already have an ATL-based IE container from another project.

Regards,
- Don

Pasted: Jan 6, 2012, 8:15:59 am
Views: 30