Don’t fall for the hype. To start with… Vitaly sent several exceedingly verbose emails yet only a few lines of his correspondence made it into his blog post. Ever heard the term “lies of omission” before?
I think that private correspondence should remain private, so I’m not going to be posting emails, but there are two sides to every story.
That’s exactly the impression that someone would want to create if their goal was to make it appear as if Andrew and I are somehow in the wrong for the simple act of asking this guy not to use our work for commercial purposes. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Is this is your Disqus account?
Again, you didn’t read the full email threads. There’s a reason Vitaly didn’t post everything.
Actually I’d say that reactions like yours are exactly what Vitaly wanted. I have no motive for creating any sort of fracture, but Vitaly has a clear motive for doing so. If plugin developers don’t let him use their work for free, he would have no product to sell, so he needed to pull this stunt to give himself plausible deniability if/when plugins are removed.
Let’s say someone contacts Vitaly and says: “Remove my plugins, I don’t want anything to do with miRack.” What happens then is that Vitaly has to pull those plugins from his app, which will break existing patches and potentially create unhappy customers who ask for refunds. This is probably the reason why he refused to remove the Fundamental plugins in the first place.
That’s a bit like saying the Nike logo is just two curves, so it doesn’t qualify as a trademark.