You must have incredibly good analytics to know exactly what companies are using your nuget package. Did you embed a phone home?
But it is easy to tell when an installation package is built by the WiX Toolset (or any other tool) when you know where to look.
Checking whether it's their own compile or official binaries is also simple if they use an extension like the official Util one, which many do: It embeds a binary that implements the custom action, which is signed by FireGiant.
As for turning this into analytics / statistics, I imagine you could just download every MSI from winget and just check if they contain a FireGiant-signed extension dll.
This isn't all that uncommon -- usually open source licenses only apply to the source.
> comically easy to bypass and literally forces someone to automate a github mirror that builds new releases. Your essentially enforcing the existence of a fork. They even provide the github actions necessary to do so in their repo already...
Yeah, cloning and building software is something that is straightforward for software developers to do. Traditionally people would clone software to their own machine, but you can use GitHub or whatever tools you want to work with the source. I'm not sure if I would call this a "bypass" -- this is the typical way FOSS software has always worked, and it's part of the reason why FOSS is popular :)
Any other packages you know of that are open source but have a trap license where if you download it through the package manager you owe them money? :)
Plus the license mentions the binaries have to be distributed with the same license. Attaching a "if you click this download button you owe us $10000" button doesn't seem very typical to common FOSS values :) I'd say a big reason FOSS is so popular is the free and open source nature :)
It's pretty common in Google Play and the Apple App Store. The only difference here is that payment is on the honors system.
> Plus the license mentions the binaries have to be distributed with the same license.
Sure, but there's nothing in that license that says you can't ask for money for the binaries. The only requirement of distribution in the license is:
> (A) Reciprocal Grants- For any file you distribute that contains code from the software (in source code or binary format), you must provide recipients the source code to that file [...]
It doesn't say: "if you distribute source, you must distribute binaries"
You are free to ask for money for the binaries. Now, due to the terms of the license, anyone else could distribute that binary. But it doesn't require you to do it for free.
> Attaching a "if you click this download button you owe us $10000" button doesn't seem very typical to common FOSS values :) I'd say a big reason FOSS is so popular is the free and open source nature :)
FOSS distributions have been commercially sold for many decades. I bought my first copy of Linux. FOSS has traditionally only applied to source code and any related activities have long been left open for commercial opportunity. This is how FOSS companies afford to operate.
Surprised downloading releases is in there, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure this goes against it's own license on the source code, specifically:
>each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.
At the very least it's confusing, and if anything, comically easy to bypass and literally forces someone to automate a github mirror that builds new releases. Your essentially enforcing the existence of a fork. They even provide the github actions necessary to do so in their repo already...