Tiny Core Fraud on Source Forge

If you watch new projects that are added to source forge then two weeks ago you might have noticed that Tiny Core Linux was added to their projects.

I thought this was a little bit odd as I knew Tiny Core had been around for a couple of years now. Typically if a FOSS project is going to use source forge for hosting they do so from the start. Still, I let the thought drop and went on with my day.

This evening it was brought to my attention that the Tiny Core page on source forge was not added by anyone from the Tiny Core project itself - but simply by someone trying to solicit donations from themselves with someone else's work! Roberts, the founder of Tiny Core, tried to contact source forge, but did not receive any good news from them:

"When I contacted Sourceforge with a take down notice, I was told that if it is copyrighted material that I need to contact legal and prove it"

Check his post here for his full scoop on the matter. In short - the md5 sums on the source forge page match the md5 sums on the Tiny Core main downloads site - it is the exact same disc. I think it is horrible that source forge is refusing to take down this obvious fraud without first being called into legal action.

This is a slippery slope and I think if this issue is not resolved swiftly and properly we are going to see more of these copied projects appearing on source forge trying to solicit donations for greedy people. If there anyone out there with some legal background that can lend a hand - please get into contact with the Tiny Core folks and help them get this resolved!

For those that are not familiar with Tiny Core it is a super minimalistic Linux distro that runs on the 2.6 kernel and weighs in at 10megs. It uses Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. Check it out if you haven't already.

~Jeff Hoogland