GIMP is free software and ethical. Paint.net is the same rental model that Photoshop is now using and is completely against the public interest for us to put our resources into that sort of business.
For anyone interested, the MIT-licensed source is still out there: https://github.com/rivy/OpenPDN
I wouldn't call this a "shame". A project as complex and significant as GIMP/paint.net may take a lot of time to maintain and to improve. If you can't find a persistent way to fund yourself, turning it proprietary becomes a tentative option. I understand and respect the decision of the developer of paint.net. As open source developers (I am one of them), we are responsible not only for our users but also for ourselves and our families. Everyone has a life after all.
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/oh-wh...
> used for expressing sympathy or disappointment
I release most of my own code under a license similar to MIT (the ISC license) and as long as the people who are using my code honor the conditions of the license they are free to rebrand it and sell it if they want to or to do whatever else that doesn't violate the license.
Often I feel that if someone is going to redistribute an MIT licensed project with modifications, they should rebrand it. For example say that I wanted to sell copies of FreeBSD as a whole with some of my own patches and modifications. I would not be able to call that FreeBSD without first working out an agreement with the FreeBSD Foundation [1]. The reason for this being that FreeBSD is a trademark of the FreeBSD Foundation and so they get to retain control of it. This is how it should be. This is what I like about the MIT family of licenses, the code is free but the license does not grant rights to use a trademark. When I say rebrand, note that proper attribution is still required.
However, if binaries are redistributed unmodified then I think it should be ok to refer to it by the original name because then that name is an accurate representation of exactly what is being distributed.
Furthermore I think that when just maintaining source changes in a public repo it should not be necessary to rebrand.
Meanwhile, if someone completely stripped my name from something I wrote and they didn't give me the proper attribution, they'd be in violation of the license and therefore the license would be void. If someone is going to use my code, they are going to attribute me in the manner that is set out in the license.
IANAL, TINLA.
[1]: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/legal/trademark-usage-term...
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
They can also continue doing that too, since changing string of a disassembled binary isn't that hard.
We're talking about http://www.getpaint.net, right? This is proprietary desktop software, but as far as I can tell, it is gratis. (They do solicit donations, but paying has no bearing on the license.)
Implying that non-free software is unethical? That's a rather rude thing to say.
> A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
For people who think that users deserve the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software they use, nonfree software is indeed unethical. Even more so when the software is used by the developers as an instrument of injust power.
Implying that non-free software is unethical isn't rude. Especially since I didn't insist that this particular software is deeply unethical. I just suggested that support for ethical software like GIMP is the right thing to do and so supporting less ethical software is something I'm suggesting avoiding.
Now, having learned from other comments about this particular case, I'll agree that as proprietary software goes, Paint.net sounds unusually good in the ethics realm, just not quite on par with GIMP, but I'd say net ethical after all.
Absolutely. It is.
There may be few other options in the current global economic system, but it does not make it any more ethical.