[Android Apps and Games] joyrider3774:
I have no idea about the current situation on this but it's fairly simple to see what's going on..., i'll probably step on a few people's toe's ...

On the one hand you got the "end user" (so non dev's) they don't care how it's done as long as they can use it and it works then their happy (wrong attitude), some of these users doesn't even care how they acquire it (illegally ?)... they also don't care about license stuff just the end product (which is totally wrong) i'm not saying every single one of them is like this but a huge amount of them are...

On the other hand you got the dev's who "rant" about it, but they have a valid point and those who do, most probably are / were active in the "open source area" and have seen theirs or others code been (re)used without conforming to a license (if there is one), it's getting even worse if they are going to ask money for some software or parts of it that is fully open and created by other people's hard work... (proper word for this all is "stealing" in my opinion).

Imagine someone creating a library that can do everything you want (many examples apply) and makes it open source and then comes along someone that just uses that lib and sells it and create a "frontend" for the functions inside the lib, it doesn't seem honest to me that the guy that spend the most work and time on it and actually made it all possible is getting squad and the one just using the hard work of other people will get payed.

Or if you'd like a real life example, you work in a team at the office, you do all the hard work for some project and in the end your work partner, just changes a few small things and put their name on it, and get the credit plus a huge bonus from the boss. you wouldn't like that either would you ?

i think i've seen other apps in the store doing this although i'm not certain about it since i didn't bother to look at it but it does piss me off as well...

The sad part is that this is happening far to often and not only on mobile phones but on every machine and it's really bad in places where piracy is somewhat accepted.. Just look at all those korean / chinese PMP's coming out that allows you to play snes, gba, nes, gb etc they all use open source emulators, they never asked the original dev's if they could use the sources for it, nor do the orignal authors get payed for it nor did they release source code, yet those pmp manufacturers are still selling the devices and raking in money because the end user likes playing on those emulators...

I got something else to tell, some dev's most probably had the same thing happening to them ..

I'm a dev myselve in my spare and work time and only recently got an android phone, before i had one i was active in the gp2x and dingoo scene i saw other things there too, not completely related to license issues (although it exists as well), for example it kinda pissed me of that i always tried to create "remakes" as in completly self written games, self made graphics etc. It takes a huge amount of time to create / code this all, when your actually finished with the product release your software / game (for free), you don't see any intrest because everyone is overhyped about the latest port of game xy or some port of an emulator that came out and that took way less time to make it work since it's a "port" and other people already did the hard work for you. My response to this was simple i just stopped creating "remakes" / software made by myselve since it was a waste of time and just started doing ports as well... this is in my opinion a bit of a shame since it's frustating and doesn't push forward new software. You just get to see the same stuff over and over again on other devices. basically what i mean with this last section is that it's mostly due the end user fault...

Anyway back on topic, i do understand that it's not as easy to port software from another system to android since you can't compile native and have to use the ndk for it and takes a bit more work then a simple port would normally take you. I do think that no money can't be asked for software using open source / gpl'ed libs / code , it's jut not right and it happens way to often...

so hat's of to betaboy for bringing this up since it's not easy to do so and he probably knew he'd get a few angry messages...

Just my two cents on it..