If you're on Lifehacker, please take a moment to vote for the PortableApps.com Suite here:
[UPDATE, VOTING IS NOW LIVE:]
http://lifehacker.com/5389421/five-best-portable-apps-suites
Even if you don't have an account yet, sign up and post a vote anyway, they'll hopefully be counted. We'll post when the top five choice is so you can be sure to vote for us.
Side note: It would be kind of sad if one of the suites that illegally used our software won.
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I saw your comment on Lifehacker. What's coming on Wednesday?
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
PAM 2.0 i think
"It's just an online installer. It's not going to mug you.", JTH
"The shell is the key to unlock Linux's greatest advantages."
Hey, I voted, but I don't know if it will be counted.
Here's hoping that it is
Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world
grrrrr I was about to post that:/
o well.. Im voting for shure
"It's just an online installer. It's not going to mug you.", JTH
"The shell is the key to unlock Linux's greatest advantages."
voted
Matthew Feuer
It's already a landslide, and uh, they sorta feature our apps there ;).
Insert original signature here with Greasemonkey Script.
The vote seems fixed and predetermined. Even if you strip all the negative implications from that statement (none are intended), the fact remains that any answer besides PortableApps.com is incorrect. Why?
1. PortableApps.com is open source, legal, and in English.
2. None of the others can make all three claims.
Also, almost every app in the Suite is outdated. The best suite is the one you make yourself.
No offense is intended. We all here know which one is best. Lifehacker and its readers do, too. The makers of some of the other suites will vote for theirs, but it won't change anything.
So sad...
We're already becoming a big gigantic evil big gigantic beast.
Insert original signature here with Greasemonkey Script.
What's evil about what JTH & co. are doing? And what's wrong with being big and gigantic?
Microsoft got where they were by being the best in the world at what they do (to steal Chris Jericho's lingo, it sounds good). They may have slacked off lately, though that's largely subjective, but it's pretty much unanimous -- history and the numbers speak for themselves -- that they owned all in the '80s and '90s. Today's Microsoft has a lot of problems.
Likewise, PortableApps.com is the best at what they do, and they offer the safest and most widely tested portable apps that ensures their end users have the best experience possible, and that's to be commended.
PortableApps won by a landslide (59% as of now)... Again...
And what John refers to as "The Illegal Software Packager" (:P) has 2%...
I wonder, what are the odds that LiberKey is illegal?
Insert original signature here with Greasemonkey Script.
They've actually outright taken our launchers before (after disabling the splash, removing the readme, removing the GPL license and removing the source code). They did Firefox and the other Mozilla apps without permission (and removing our bookmarks and replacing them with theirs). Stuff like Google Chrome, uTorrent and others is done without permission.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Why would Lifehacker even include a site that's distributing illegal apps in their poll? Do they not know, or not care, or what?
Toshiba is better to the environment than a lot of common electronic companies. Check out Greenpeace's Guide To Greener Electronics 8)
I hope I'm wrong but I suspect they don't care. I've been reading lifehacker for a long time and there's been a few times where their advice and what they choose to endorse has been dubious at best and even with complaints they usually don't pay attention.
I had no idea about the illegal portable suites though, so thanks for the info. To be honest until the lifehacker article I wasn't really aware of any others besides portableapps anyway so looks like I'd already "chosen" the best.
It's called selective caring. They might be opposed to sites that distribute, say, Photoshop, but not so much a site that wrongfully distributes Firefox. And people here will get all up in arms over Firefox, a program which is free, being distributed without permission, but yet they (we) offer Nintendo emulators, which are used to pirate commercial games on hardware that they were never even intended to be run on. Now, I've run some emulators as much as the next guy, but to get all up in arms over who can distribute a program which is given away for free when you willfully violate the license terms of commercial games, well, what you're doing is picking and choosing which licenses you respect. Which laws you respect. We all do it -- like speeding, or jaywalking. Sure it's illegal, but 99% of the time, nothing will come of it. It's somebody's pet peeve -- any of these examples -- but most people just don't care.
We had ourselves a little debate about this a couple months ago, and I certainly don't mean to rub salt in old wounds, but that is essentially what Lifehacker is doing. They don't care which of these portable suites is on the up-and-up. They're just saying, "this is what's out there -- pick your favorite". And it's commendable that the one that tries the hardest to do right by the software authors it represents is winning. (To be fair, though, none of the emulators are in the Suite, or posted on the Applications listing, so the site's proverbial hands are clean.)
No roms are linked to from this site. That means the site doesn't violate any laws. Emulators do have potentially illegal use but they them self are not illegal. Therefore your argument is technically void. At least that's my perspective. Anyone care to confirm or disprove?
PortableApps.com Advocate
No, you're right. The emulator itself is perfectly legal. It just has no function that is both legal and practical. It could be argued that homebrew is a legal function, but as homebrew is an attempt to dumb down some PC program for a console. Running it on an emulator is counter-productive.
The argument is not void, technically or otherwise. The analogy is flawed, but saying that emulating console games is "at least as bad as" violating freeware licenses is a very generous statement, since there's no legal and practical use of an emulator that doesn't involve, at the very least, a license violation.
It's actually ironic: It's not illegal to use Firefox, regardless of the site you got it from, but it's illegal to redistribute it without permission, yet with permission, it's OK. On the other hand, there's no legal and practical use of a console emulator, but it's legal to redistribute open source emulators. So it just seems to me that somebody who really cares who distributes Firefox wouldn't think to mess with emulators, even if it means a choice between buying the old console and games on eBay, or not enjoying those games.
The debate is moot however. We're all adults here, we all know that emulating game ROMs is illegal, and that license violations are illegal. We can be sly and justify either until we're blue in the face, but if we accept one and reject the other, we can't be absolute about right and wrong. But then again, who wants to be absolute? Lifehacker isn't and they don't pretend to be. PA.c isn't absolutely right; emulators put us on a fine line. I agree we're in the clear. And again, I'm all for enjoying the classics on modern hardware, I've just got no illusions that it's 100% legal.
Yeah, emulators are in a kind of grey zone, but taking the software from someone else and distributing it as your own without proper credits and not respecting the GPL license is illegal and immoral.
OK, but what about playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games on your PC? Is that really better?
At one point, I believe JTH or one of our other outspoken advocates of open source and licensing, said that violating licenses like Mozilla's (Firefox) and Piriform's (CCleaner), though those products are free, is just as bad as pirating commercial software. Surely it goes both ways?
Since the only practical use of an emulator is pirating copyrighted material (the games), use of an emulator is at least as bad as using Firefox and CCleaner obtained from unofficial sources. As an avid gamer, I think pirating games is actually worse than "using freeware/open source/GPL the wrong way" but I am willing to concede that they're "about the same". I cannot concede that freeware license violation is "worse than" pirating games. Just can't. It's like saying assault is worse than murder or that embezzlement is worse than armed robbery. It does not compute.
Emulating ROMs and downloading Firefox/CCleaner from unauthorized sources are both, for the most part, victimless crimes. As long as the software packages are unmodified, where you got them from is a technical distinction. And many games that we want to play haven't been ported to a platform we have. Many have been ported to the Wii's virtual console, but who all wants a console based on swinging your arms around like a monkey? Some, but not all of us who want to play classic games. Xbox Live has some Genesis games up ($5 apiece) and that's cool too, but in either case you really can't take them on the go. Besides, these games have paid for their development time and again in most cases.
So I've really got nothing against either, it just lights a fire under my, uh, it lights a fire under me to hear someone say that playing pirated games (even under the guise of "using emulators, which are free and open source programs!") is not nearly as bad as not jumping through the right hoops to use free (as in beer, not as in speech) software.