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[This project has been discontinued due to license compliance issues. Thanks everyone who assisted with your ideas and feedback.]

About

  • What is this? - this was a project dedicated to building an up-to-date collection of great, free portable software for easy installation and use.
  • What's in it? - list of included freeware
Releases
  • v. 1.3 beta - note that this release is over a year old and contains very out-of-date software. I haven't worked out how to solve licensing issues. Download

NEWS

Saturday, August 1, 2009

License-friendly release due August 9th

Much to my chagrin, I'm going to release Kitchen Sink without Firefox and a few other programs that I'm not yet allowed to distribute. I don't know if Mozilla will ever give me a license so I might as well continue without them. John Haller didn't sound optimistic on this issue in his otherwise very helpful follow-up e-mail. That release will obviously happen a little over a week from this posting.

Although I'm disappointed to be doing this without having cleared things up, its is important to continue development and improvement independent of legal questions. People not having the software because I have an emotional attachment to having all my programs how I want them is absurd.

That said, I'm not sad to be throwing out Winamp, which was on its way out anyhow. Foobar2000 is proving to be the replacement I've been looking for all these years.

On a side note, I'm deeply disappointed that Firefox is not as freely distributable as other GPL programs, which you are free to modify and distribute so long as you include the source code. Still, I understand Mozilla has a huge organization to protect and the good here obviously outweighs the bad by a substantial margin. Still, I find myself hearing RMS's words echo in my head about the four freedoms.

6 comments:

guinness said...

yes good to see you didnt give up.
-guinness

Folding Home said...

:) Once I figured out it was a problem I could solve, I stopped worrying.

guinness said...

have a look at www.softwarespot.wordpress.com I have a new program!
-guinness

guinness said...

did you have change to look at the AutoIT script for Kitchen Sink? There is so much you could do, for example even though it would have any real security benefit you could place a password in an ini file that is encrypted and then when the user starts up Kitchen sink they would have to enter the password to start PStart. Now obviously you and I would just go hunting around the directory. Its more for the computer novice who thinks the windows login password is uncrackable!!!

Folding Home said...

> did you have change to look at the AutoIT script for Kitchen Sink?

Sadly this license stuff has put me in the position of doing a lot of work that doesn't include actually improving the collection.

> There is so much you could do, for example even though it would have any real security benefit you could place a password in an ini file that is encrypted and then when the user starts up Kitchen sink they would have to enter the password to start PStart.

That could be useful, sure.

> Now obviously you and I would just go hunting around the directory. Its more for the computer novice who thinks the windows login password is uncrackable!

Heh, agreed. :)

Folding Home said...

> have a look at www.softwarespot.wordpress.com I have a new program!

Very cool! Keep up the good work. :)