When Open Source Goes Bad - SocialWebCMS guilty of copyright infringement

SocialWebCMS has been caught in the past taking code from the awesome Open Source project Pligg CMS and calling it their own. This time they have been caught taking
commercially copyrighted material and again are passing it off as their own. While browsing through their website I found they were offering a module very similar to one Pligg
offers only through their premium shop.

Since I had purchased the module in question from Pligg I decided to download the one SocialWebCMS is offering for free to see if was any better. I was shocked at what I had found.

SocialWebCMS has become so desperate to be relevant, they had to stoop to the level of buying copyrighted material from their competitor, change one word, and then distribute it for free.

From the readme file and a quick search of the Pligg forums proves this commercial module was released on AUG 20th 2008

A look at the SocialWebCMS module's readme says it was released on Sept 5th 2008. 16 days after Pligg made this module available.

Lets look at the structure of both these modules.

First we see the Original Copyrighted Commercial Pligg Module below

Now lets take a look at the stolen module from SocialWebCMS

Lets look inside that template folder of the Pligg Module and see what's in there!

Now lets look inside the template folder for the stolen SocialWebCMS module.

Anyone seeing a pattern?

It couldn't be a coincidence could it?

So lets compare a line of code from 2 files.

Line 14 from quick_submit_ini.php

module_add_action_tpl('tpl_pligg_above_center', quick_submit_tpl_path . 'quick_submit_index.tpl');

Line 14 from easy_submit_ini.php

module_add_action_tpl('tpl_pligg_above_center', easy_submit_tpl_path . 'easy_submit_index.tpl');

There you go folks. They changed the word QUICK to EASY and think that this permits them to violate copyright. They even went so far as to release it as open source under the Affero GPL license. The original work was not.

According to WHOIS SocialWebCMS is owned by:

Damon Wirth ashdigg@gmail.com

123 N Main St
Rockford, Illinois 61103
United States

815-123-4567

A search on Google Maps shows this to be a parking garage.

Maybe that is Mr Wirth there selling HotDogs?

I hope Pligg LLC sues the shit out of these guys. From my research I've learned that they are a group of disgruntled douchbags that were banned from the Pligg forums over a year ago for causing disruptions, spamming other members, and for being huge dicks. They thought it would be smart if they started their own fork. From what I can gather, none of them even know how to write code. They took an old version out of Pligg's SVN, removed the copyright and changed the donation links then called it their own. Anyone that uses SocialWebCMS is at great risk of having your site hacked cause the code base they are using is very outdated and totally unsecured. 

Also you might want to stay away from their website. It's hosted on a lame shared server and has been hacked with viruses many times already. For a period of time Google even banned the listing because visiting the site would harm your computer. Firefox still gives me this warning about once a week.

UPDATE:

I emailed Pligg to let them know of my findings. I received the following reply.

Thank you for contacting Pligg LLC. 

We are aware of the situation and are taking the appropriate legal steps in this matter.