Notepad3 vs. Notepad2, or The Spirit of Open Source

I already mentioned Notepad2 in a past blog post: It's a nice little free Notepad replacement that meets my requirements for a program that is similar to, but slightly better than the original, with a fast startup.

That's why it makes me sad to read about what has happened to the author, Florian Balmer: Somebody took the (GPLed) source code of Notepad2, changed a few lines and released it as an "improved version" called Notepad3 to various download sites. In theory there's nothing wrong about this as the licensing conditions are met, but some kind of unpleasant aftertaste remains to put it mildly.

Read the full story in a commentary by Florian titled The Spirit of Open Source.

5 Comments

  • Notepad2 is one of the first apps that get installed wherever I go. Florian has done a great job (something MS hasn't been able to do) so it is a bit unfortunate for this to happen...hopefully the developer(s) of the forked project will reconsider their move and name their fork of Notepad2 to something distinguishable....

  • the notepad3 guy didn't do anything wrong, he just followed the gpl.

  • @Anders: As I wrote, in theory there's nothing wrong about this as the licensing conditions are met. And I guess things would be a bit different if Notepad2 was really greatly enhanced.

  • Notepad2 has some bug in "replace" dialog box.
    Some Asia character appearance not accurate.

  • @grammophon: I'm not quite sure... is this something that was fixed in "Notepad3"?

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