It's heart breaking to watch a project I've put alot of effort in burn to the ground, but that's exactly what's happening at Aqua-Soft.org. A site devoted to emulating the OSX GUI on Windows OS's, it's had a good life. There's a list of problems at the site, yet one issue keeps coming back again and again, and I fear this will eventually kill the site forever. The site keeps violating copyright, and after four years the site may have months, or at best, days to live.
One of the biggest problems has always been violation of copyright. From the beginning the community violated Apples copyright at every turn. A new icon? Rip it. A new interface? Tear it apart and rebuild it on Windows. Strangely though, as other sites attempting to do the same thing were shot down by Apple legal, Aqua skins remained under the radar.
Not for lack of effort by the Mac community. Almost like clockwork, every few months a new Mac community would begin it's assault to have us shut down. I know these crusades usually involved a heavy amount of email to Apple about what we were doing at the site, but nothing negative really ever came Aqua-Softs way. Usually the staff could end one of these tirades with a cute post about maintaining the utmost respect for Apple and other artists, and that the site was only trying to bring PC users over to Mac. Yeah, I know, it's getting DEEP in here.
Truthfully, the community didn't give a rats ass about Apple's copyrights. The hard line was, don't rip the small guy, the community artist; the big companies were fair game. That is, until I received information this morning that images from Konfabulator, a Mac application, we're being illegally distributed on the site. After a little investigation I realized the problem was BAD, and that some of the downloads had been right in front of me and other moderators for months without us doing a thing. Konfabulator isn't a big company, and the downloads were unexcuseable Whats SAD is the excuses that were thrown out by hardcore community members. I don't think the Copyright police in their obviously French berets are going to come knocking at Aqua-Soft anytime soon, but it's hard to continue to justify a position on something like copyright when the people you're defending will make any excuse possible to continue stealing from others.
For me, that's a line I no longer want to skirt. I'm tired of it. Apple can keep it's gloss.
I've started another site, Aero-Soft.com. It's not about ripping from another platform, it's about shaping the future of skinning. Right now we're just getting our legs, but I already see great things in our future. Maybe it helps that the sites images were made on the co-admins iBook?
Next Blog: 25minutes away from Huntsville and the human peer rating system.