Geeklog Forums

While surfing the web I came across a company's site that creates web sites. At the bottom of each page there is a logo that says "Created with MindFab". But each and every site is created with Geeklog. I don't know if you have an agreement with this company, but I just wanted to let you know. http://www.mindfab.com

Wow - and not a single mention of Geeklog anywhere! Now there's gratitude for ya.

Actually if you go to there links page, the first link it shows says "MindFab configures and hosts software called GeekLog." For professional sites it can look kind of silly to have "geeklog" plastered on the bottom of every page. Don't assume the worst... -Vinny

At the PHPchalktalk site, he has sections for both free and opensource, but there is no mention of GL that I can find. This is on a site specifically designed to discuss PHP and MySQL. Dirk should make sure he uses those in GL2 so that he can get mentioned on the site

I believe from previous posts that Dirk and the gang don't care if you leave the Geeklog tag at the bottom of the page. I leave it, just because I think these guys should get all the props they can.

But I don't think that mindfab site is as bad as it initially looks. If you look on their links page they mention running sites with Geeklog.

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Paul 'T1Pimp'
http://www.Huggybeer.com - Geek news with attitude

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Paul 'T1Pimp'
http://www.Huggybeer.com - Geek news with attitude

I wasn't assuming the worst... rather just a little bit suprised not to see some sort reference to Geeklog. Sure it's not in their interest to plaster it everywhere - but a little "powered by" would go down well I'm sure. But if as you say there is at least one reference well I'll have to let them off the hook. :-)

I cannot agree more. When I want to publish an investment newsletter with Geeklog, I'll have to make triple sure that the word "Geek" never appears anywhere. Otherwise I'm out of clients and a laughing stock on the street. Actually, my proposal to GL team is to create a supported stable release of Geeklog, call it differently (say, Technologist Journal) and then to offer commercial support on "per incident" basis (through support tickets) and customisation. Put it on a different site. And don't wait for GL2, since this one is widely used and stable. Meanwhile, Geeklog will remain a venerable name for hobby and self-made websites. ---1gor GeekLook.com Designer Themes

I agree the name Geeklog is okay to put on a hobby or personal website. Changing it to Technological Journal would be no better. That's a terrible name for a product. For professional sites, they won't want to have any name on their site's pages no matter what it's called though a different name would make it more marketable to them. As for MindFab, I think what they are doing is very deceptive. Each site they have helped install says "Made with MindFab" in the footer of each page. It gives the public the impression a software called MindFab is what is powering the site. If one or more of the developers are running this one, then this is okay to do. If they aren't, the advertisement in footers should say "Designed by MindFab" or "Hosted by MindFab" or something similar instead. A slight wording change but a big difference in meaning. Although they do have a disclaimer in the weblinks section, most people do not click on every link of a hosting site. It's intentionally far away from the order page. Most people are also not tech savvy. If they happened to look in the code later on and saw Geeklog they would just think it was a product made by MindFab. OSCommerce regularly goes after sites like this one which place their name without permission on pages generated by OSC giving a false impression. It's done very discreetly and offenders are not slammed on OSC's site. They do this to protect the product's identity. I think Geeklog ought to do the same. It's your copyright though so do what you want.

IMHO you are mistaken about open source. Nothing forbids you to make modifications to GPLd code and to release it under new name, providing you give credits to copyright owners of included code. Otherwise I guess Linux would HAVE to be called GNU/Linux as RMH insists... Think of Stronghold, RH DB etc. Looks like Mindfab are not even selling the code, they are selling the service based on GL which they support. Perfectly legitimate open source business model. I believe the more people try to make money with Geeklog the better for its future. ---1gor GeekLook.com Designer Themes

I am not mistaken. Nothing forbids anyone from making changes in GPL code. It forbids another person from claiming ownership though. This is what is being done by using the phrase "Made with MindFab" on every page of other sites. Not even the word "by" but "with". If you checked the sites built, they don't show any new features to indicate MindFab rewrote the core code or made new addons. Before bringing up an example like Linux to support your argument, please do some reading in this area.

I never commented about them making money. GPL allows others to make money by redistributing the software, installing, selling hosting, customizing software, providing warranty, etc. My post was on product identity and deceptively making the public think all these sites run on something called "MindFab".

It's people like you who think putting their name on someone else's work is okay is the very reason I will not contribute what I develop to the GPL community. I support open source, but I do not support this particular license. If the developers here don't care what MindFab is doing it is their right.

Also, if you guys cared to look, you'd have noticed that the title of every one of their pages state "MindFab.com - e-Portfolio, <b>Geeklog Hosting</b>, ..." <p>While I agree that what they're doing is kinda deceptive, I cannot condemn their site since they do mention GeekLog here and there.---L. Whitworth www.finiserv.com

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L. Whitworth

Hey folks, I appreciate reading this thread. As one of the partners in MindFab, it's relevant to put my 2c into the discussion so you know where we stand. I hope you'll read this to the end. First, there is reference to GeekLog on our site, right in the links section of the site. As one person pointed out as well, it's in the title of our site. We're certainly not trying to hide it. We are however trying to get it more into the mainstream of corporate, academic and personal sites. Coming from an e-learning and knowledge management background, we believe there are great KM possibilties as well. We believe there are many in the mainstream who have no clue about this world of OSS and easy content management, have no ability to install this stuff and configure it themselves, and without distributors like us and many others, would have no access to this great software. That said, this type of GeekLog client could not care less whether it's open source, what technologies are used to pump it, and so on. In fact, most of our clients would never search us out if we led with "We're GeekLog hosts" - they have no idea what that means and move right by. So, if we don't have that up front and center, it's not because we're trying to hide it, it's because it has no meaning to a neophyte site owner we're trying to reach. If we were to plunge them directly into geeklog.net, we'd be doing them a disservice and they'd be completely and utterly lost as to what the next step would be. The main thrust of the geeklog.net site and others focusing on GeekLog is to develop the community of GeekLog developers, primarily, and to some extent users. At a minimum to read this site takes a fair bit of technical background and most of our clients don't come with that and never will have it. That said, there is no good user documentation for GeekLog that we can point our users to here. We're planning to write that for our own purposes, to share with this community of course, but the fact is, we support our clients directly and need documentation to do so. This brings up another point that's worth mentioning. We support an entire package of services, not just GeekLog. We spend hours, and sometimes days with a particular customer just to get them to understand this thing. We sell cheap sites so spending any more than a couple hours trying to sell someone a site is a total loss, and we've got at least a 2-dozen customers that fall into that camp. So, it's not an easy sell, it's a complex piece of software with a lot of functionality they want to understand, and it's complex at first blush. The bottom line is, we've spent many more hours at this than we'll ever see returned. I've been living off my home equity to start this business so it has never paid and is not offsetting the cost of hosting and time we've put into it. So, we contract, we instruct, we scrap like everyone else to make a living. That said, the bottom line is we like this stuff, so we keep doing it. GL is not the only thing we're hosting. We wrap other services around it including email, mail list management, and supply helpdesk support to them. The point is, we could if we wanted to, say "Ok, now you have a GeekLog site, you must get all your support over at geeklog.net." The last thing this community would want is our clients over here asking questions about their Ensim email because they don't understand where they fit in the whole food chain of open source technologies. So, you can simply look at us like we're distributors of Open Source, not just GL, but RedHat, MySQL, PHP, Apache, and a host of other open source technologies that go into making these things. I want to point out another thing I see happening in OSS software communities: 1) of the 26 million or so web sites on the internet running Apache, many if not most do not display the Apache feather. If you check out geeklog.net from netcraft.com, you see: site geeklog.net is running Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b DAV/1.0.3 PHP/4.3.0 mod_perl/ 1.26 on Linux. Of the over 12 million sites running PHP, most do not badge it with powered by PHP. I don't know how many sites are running with MySQL, but the same goes there as well. And of course, a large part of most Linux distros came from GNU, not Linus, but GNU rarely receives mention. So, rather than putting too fine a point on it, I'll just insure that people understand that most sites on the net, including geeklog.net, use many, many open source technologies for which no mention or credit is given. Part of it may be practicality in even knowing everything you should acknowledge in OSS, some of it may be marketing in reducing confusion and trying to present a complete OSS package. But the fact remains, not everything OSS gets credit even when it's the backbone of the web like Apache. MindFab is packaging many OSS technologies so it's easy to get into a web site. This same approach is also implied in the bottom statement of the geeklog.net site when you read "Powered by GeekLog" - in fact it's not powered by GeekLog alone, but a host of OSS technologies. So, the big things to keep in mind here are: 1) it's nearly impossible to acknowlege all OSS contributions to any OSS package 2) to mainstream OSS, sometimes it's necessary to package things so it's easy to get into and to do that you have to narrow down the scope of what the person thinks they're getting into. They don't care if it's MySQL or PosgressSQL behind the scenes and even bringing it up gets a raised eyebrow (they don't know, they don't care, they just want a dynamic site.) Back to the "Made with ****" - we badged our sites with "Made with MindFab" in the spirit of "made in conjunction with" which is way too long. It's obviously ambiguous and people have taken it the wrong way. Because of that, we've changed it to simply "Hosted by MindFab". One person wrote us saying they thought "Made by MindFab" would be better. Personally, I think that's just as ambiguous. But the main thing is that we're hosting many services, not just GL, so putting powered by GeekLog on our sites is not even accurate and doesn't tell the whole story, so we'll just leave it at "Hosted by MindFab." I have personally contributed a few things to this site in my GL travels - see: http://www.geeklog.net/ article.php?story=2002080419482031 as an example of a nasty I found and provided a solution for. This week my partner and I are planning to start on a GeekLog user manual because we simply spend too much time supporting user questions from our clients about basic use. When we get that done, we're glad to donate it - the fact is, we simply need it and it's worth it to us to write it for our own purposes. I want to inject a few other items, as if there weren't enough things to discuss, into this conversation. One of the things I cover in my PHP/MySQL training classes is the history of open source and how it is different from Free Software and what the genesis of things like Linux were. If you study that you basically wind your way back to Richard Stallman who codifed his free software principles in the GPL. The essence of Stallman's definition of free software comes down to 4 freedoms (essays available on fsf.org): Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (Access to source is a precondition) Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Acces to source is a precondition.) So, the GPL is used specifically to codify legally the above principles. He goes on to say: "Thus, you may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies." And "Free software" does not mean "non-commerical". A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. He also goes on to write "Selling Free Software - Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible - just enough to cover the cost. Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." All these essays are available on the fsf.org web site and form the philisophical basis for GPL. So, ultimately the question for anyone who is using OSS for any purpose, modifying, redistributing, or even selling it, "Have you violated these 4 tenants of the GPL?" Many people on this site fall into the camp of using it, many fall into the camp of modifying it, a few us fall into the camp of redistributing it. I know of no one selling it, but there is nothing in the GPL that restricts someone for charging for the software if you read the Stallman essays on GPL. Anyway, part of me is wanting to defend our efforts to distribute OSS, part of me is thinking there's no reason to defend, so rather than taking a defensive approach, I wanted to take an explanatory approach. I hope you appreciate what we're trying to do and now understand some of our thinking behind the company.

Yawn, you really need to do some reading about the php, mysql, and apache licenses before using them as examples to support your case. Like Geeklog, those projects and their licenses do not require anyone to visibily post on our sites we are using them. At the same time, none of us has rebranded and claimed them as our own work like you have done on every site you installed. Please don't give us the BS you are doing this for the greatness of the community and these poor people would just get confused. By your own admission, they are neophytes and most likely won't be contributing back just like you haven't and you won't. The least you could is not insult us with a long sappy post and be honest. You are doing this all for your own profit and don't care about furthering the community. You put your own name on each site for your own selfish reasons. If people are wise, they will stop releasing any more plugins and blocks for free. If you think it's okay to plaster your name on their work, then I think the developers should charge a fee so it's not a total insult when people like you replace it with yours which is a brain.

The relevant things here are: 1) I made my posting and identified myself to the community and made a genuine attempt to talk about the issues in a serious way. You are happy to remain anonymous and I think that speaks for itself. 2) Time will tell whether contributions are forthcoming. No need to speculate about it - either you will be right or I will. We have contributions to make that are ready now, but as you might know it takes more than just having something ready to contribute it. As a result of this thread, though, because I think you're being silly to accuse when you know nothing about me, as a few proof-points, I'm going to contribute some skin variations - one was heavily "fixed" which had a lot of problems when it was w3c validated, but was a good starting point. Over the coming days and weeks, I'll start posting links to user docs we'll churn out. We'll chip away at it and our contributions will add up over time. Whether you care about those things or not, I don't know, but we see these as aspects of promoting and pushing GL further into the mainstream, which is one of our goals. They are valid contributions. You as an anonymous poster, might be Dirk or Tony, but I suspect not; because you're anonymous we can't now "compete" to see who's going to contribute more going forward. Would be a curious exercise though. Here's an example question I got from a client just this morning: --- "I created two users, Miguel and kitz from within the portal. I wanted both of them to be able to add stories, so I checked "Story Admin" as a group they belonged to. However, when they go to submit a story it says they aren't authorized: "Sorry, you do not have access to the story administration page. Please note that all attempts to access unauthorized features are logged." I thought maybe I had to create the User in the abc.net/Admin (name withheld) interface. I tried this with kitz and she was still unable to enter a story. I've checked the faqs and tutorials and couldn't find any help with this issue. I have to be able to let my users add stories and events. Can you help? Also, I wanted to ask what is involved when I am ready to add/ change the domain name to the xyz.org (name witheld) domain. I only have the abc.net (name withheld) so that I can work with the site now... eventually I will probably want to use just the xyz.org domain since that is the original one." --- I answer questions like this all the time because people see their entire site and service wrapped together and don't usually distinguish their questions by what's a PHP, MySQL, GL, email, domain question. They want to go to one place to get their questions answered - that's one of the values we offer people. So, if you think about it, maybe it takes 2-3 hours of sales work to talk someone into a site, they buy a year for $120, then you support them with questions like this for a year. You tell me - have I put my effort, money and time where my mouth is? I'm so far in debt because of this now, it's not even funny. So, if my "rebranding" efforts (as you put it) were profiting me so much, I'd be a marketing genius. As it is, I'm not and I've got the red-ink to prove it. In the end, just so people like you wouldn't get the wrong idea we've changed our badge. On the contributions side: I've got an entire email list/contact management package I've written that I'm considering contributing as open source as a good starting point (See www.phpsoapbox.com ) It's currently commercial and we host it on mindfab.com as an exclusive (now.) SoapBox could certainly be used as a basis to add capability to GL. Who knows? Point is I have stuff to contribute that I've built. I just pull the trigger and it's OSS. So, as I said, time will tell on the contributions. Either you'll be right, or I will. I'm not worried.

Ok, just so you know I'm not blowing smoke in the other comments in response to your attack about not being willling to contribute or to give credit, I've released 3 new theme colorizations (variations on existing) for your use. You can download the new themes:

3 new MindFab.com variations on themes - http://www.mindfab.com/ filemgmt/index.php

There's more where that came from - no one has asked us for any of these, so we never published them. Guess to make sure you know we're not trying to hold back, just have limited time like everyone else, I've uploaded a few of these.

Also, so no one thinks we're trying to hide the credits, I added a "credits" topic and story.

Enjoy the new themes. We'll publish more as we have time.

Landon Cox

Well, whether the guys here care about credit or not, there is something pretty freeking sleazy about even IMPLYING that something someone else did is your own product. I've heard the Apache, MS WORD analogy before. It's deeply flawed. Apache serves what the user sees. WORD does likewise (in the form of a printed page). No one hands in a copyrighted report typed in Word, imlying that not only are they responsible for the report, but also for the program whereby the report was developed. The folks at Mindfab are very sleazily (at least right on the edge of sleaziness), implying that THEY have developed the core tools whereby the content we see is served. It would be one thing were they to simply leave off mentioning Geeklog, but copyright the pages they do (just as I do not mention that I use Word or that my page is running on Apache). But they go much further than that. What they do is analogous to my claiming that I largely wrote Apache as well as the content it serves. Sleazy - no freeking way else to look at it. I wish the Geeklog developers would not call Geeklog 2.0 "Geeklog 2.0". These folks have obviously worked very hard on this product and if they aren't going to charge us for it (for which I thank God in Heaven- cause I can't afford what its worth), they ought to at least get some sort of kudos from it - and not have to endure leeches who lie and cheat for a freekin' buck. They should rename the product because I understand the need for business people not to present clients with a product named "Geek"(anything). Business people need to present an image of strength and professionalism. That name does not quite get there. The developers should rename Geeklog 2.0 and then release it under some other license, forcing acknowledgment of its use in EACH and EVERY product, just as Macromedia does with its products. I see why guys are angry here. Here is what does it for me: When I see poor Dirk, Blaine, Tony and others here day-after-day, week-after-week, month, year-after-year, patiently answering the same dang questions over and over again, and constantly developing this thing to be what it is -- all for free (!) --, my conscience starts bugging me. So for some guy to then come along to up and lie about what I have seen every freekin' day with my own eyes strikes me as very cold, pretty dang heartless and stinky to high heavens.

Icor said: >>>On the contributions side: I've got an entire email list/contact management package I've written that I'm considering contributing as open source as a good starting point (See www.phpsoapbox.com ) It's currently commercial and we host it on mindfab.com as an exclusive (now.) <<< Brotha, this ain' no contribution. As it now stands, it is only a POTENTIAL contribution. Flip the switch and let this wonderful thing of yours beef up Geeklog. I wish I could contribute something. I certainly would. I'm trying, but the time where I will be able to contribute meaningfully is a bit off. But just because I am "thinking" about contributing doesn't mean I have contributed a **bleeping** thing.

I'm simply boggled by your attacks. In order to make it even that much more obvious, I've added a specific credits section to mindfab.com. The link to GL was always up on the links page with a description and credit. I've put up some new themes you can download. I've contributed workarounds when appropriate to this community.

I support GL users as part of the packages we host so Dirk, Blaine, Tony, and all don't have to answer user questions from people I host.

I'm not sure what else can be done to appease you, I've made a good faith effort to credit GL, I've spent a lot of time, effort, and my own money trying to take GL into the mainstream, so I shall leave it at that. It's possible you may never be convinced of my intentions even after all this.

I've never anonymously posted and always attempt to maintain the highest levels of integrity when I deal with people. Everyone reading the thread can now make up their own mind - I've done what I can to put my cards on the table.

Icor said: >>1) I made my posting and identified myself to the community and made a genuine attempt to talk about the issues in a serious way. You are happy to remain anonymous and I think that speaks for itself.<< There are a few anon posters here. I just came on. On this issue, the identity of the poster is completely irrelevant. There is only one issue of true relevance here: whether the accusations of your accusers have merit. If those accusations do not have merit, then fine. If they do have merit then fine again - and the identity of the accusation means nothing at all. This is not a court of law, wherein the character of the accuser need by brought into question. No one even needs to know you. Your web page tells the story well enough.

Lcox said >>I'm simply boggled by your attacks. In order to make it even that much more obvious, I've added a specific credits section to mindfab.com...<<< You've only done these few dinky things because a few guys here have set some fire under your tail. Prior to that, you were as content as a fly in a dead horse to leave your "Made WITH Mindfab" in place. The fact is, Geeklog is SUBSTANTIALLY part of what everyone sees in your work. This "Mindfab" that you "pseudo used" is wondrously small - so small, in fact, it does not even exist. If you wish not to link "Geeklog" to your work, just take the word off of the work. But don't go around claiming some 'speshul proprietary product' (that doesn't even exist), was used to develop your products. That is just sleazy, fella.