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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

The simple answer is "because money". It costs quite a bit to be able to do any of that. And that's not something most open source projects or developers can come anywhere close to affording.

Source: I run PortableApps.com and have had my GPL software used illegally by competing projects in other countries as well as at least one Fortune 500 here in the states.

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You made PortableApps ? I used it like seven years ago, and it was great - it helped me and a few others to learn programming on our school computers which, as you might guess, didn't have a lot of tools dedicated to that purpose.

Glad you liked it. We're still going strong. A larger percentage of our users these days now use it either locally or on a synced cloud folder. Our platform installer even detects and offers to install to Dropbox, Box, One Drive and Google Drive.

That's awesome, I've got a few things in my dropbox like that... makes it a lot easier even for those bits that I add to my windows path.

For Linux and OSX, it would be cool to see similar things.. though I've seen some interesting things using Dropbox that may yeild a portable *nix app solution one day.

You can run them on Linux via Wine and on OS X via Crossover, Wineskin, etc. We check for running via Wine in our tools and work around a few bugs where we can.

Same here, love portable apps. Used it for the same reason at my old job. Was able to teach myself enough to get a system admin gig.

Glad it helped you out. I'm still amazed at the number of folks the apps and utilities helped over the years. And a number of our devs use the experience they gain towards getting a spot at university or a job as well.

Copyright violation carries heavy penalties these days, particularly in the US. If you can prove it, get a lawyer to work on contingency. IANAL but this seems easy.

It carries heavy penalties for large players with on-staff or retained legal firms. For the rest of us, you can forget about it (source: multiple lawyers, none of whom would work on contingency for a case like this). I can absolutely prove it, but it doesn't matter. At least I got them to stop but not before they'd passed off my software as someone else's to millions.

That's a shame. I've used portableApps and it is a nice piece of software.

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