AfterDawn: News

Plextor attacks open source programmers

Shinano Kenshi, the parent company of Plextor, has sent letters to the developers of PxScan and PxLinux. They are accusing the developers for trademark and copyright violations. PxScan and it's Linux version is an open source tool for analyzing the quality of a DVD utilzing Plextor drives. It features are similar to Plextor's own PlexTools disc analyses.

It is very hard to see what is Plextor's point here. Free third party tool Kprobe has done nothing but good to LiteON drives, and like Kprobe the PxScan could very well be a reason for buying a Plextor drive if the consumer is interested in quality tests.



Sources: CDRLabs, PxScan

Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 31 May 2005 6:34

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• 5 comments

• nonoitall

  Seems like everyone who sells stuff on a large scale has been going insane with self-destructive greed recently.

  31.5.2005 12:02 #1

• ToxicFish

  I think it's a valid suit... If you were a developer and were creating the proprietary software for Plextor's drives and some jackass group looks like they stole your coding... Man, I would sue too. Doesn't matter how simple it could be, that takes hours of work. For someone to "borrow" code? Unacceptable. Even if it's over an issue like their logos looking the same, that's still a stretch.

  31.5.2005 17:28 #2

• ToxicFish

  I guess it's not a valid suit...
  http://linuxfr.org/~zeb/17243.html
  
  The above link has excerpts from messages sent between Plextor and Px. Px Creators make a good case.
  
  [Px]
  In no case we use intellectual property from Plextor. We just send SCSI commands to the drive, and display the retrieved data.

  31.5.2005 17:42 #3

• tgoose

  re "some jackass group looks like they stole your coding", the coding was entirely done by the group (or at least, none of it was taken from PlexTools). Also the article is a little misleading in that it doesn't mention that there is no official Plextor software for Linux - if these developers hadn't made this program, nobody using Linux would have any good reason to buy a Plextor drive.

  3.6.2005 07:58 #4

• nonoitall

  So these guys are giving Plextor a wider array of customers and Plextor sues them... Like I said, insane with self-destructive greed.

  3.6.2005 10:13 #5