Kagi’s Unofficial Visualhub Upgrade Prompts Response from Original Author
UPDATE: See Kagi’s response in this post.
I’m a huge fan of VisualHub. The video conversion application, a “swiss army knife” of video codec goodness, was one of the first pieces of software I bought when I switched to the Mac in 2006. It was sadly discontinued a few years ago by its author Tyler Loch, but it still worked through two subsequent OS X upgrades. It stopped working with the release of OS X Lion a few weeks ago.
Last night I received this exciting email for what I thought was the first official VisualHub upgrade in years:
A quick look at the fine print made it clear this was not an official update, but an opportunity for Kagi, the payment processing system that Visualhub used when it was an active product, to cash in on their former client’s success. What’s more, a quick visit to the VisualHub website revealed that the update was actually available for free. Loch put in some time to fix his original piece of software and make it available to prior customers so it can keep working.
This morning Loch updated his site with the following warning message:
I’ve reached out to both Loch and Kagi to figure out what’s going on here. On the surface it appears like a really lousy thing on Kagi’s part to take the work of a software author, email his customers, and try to profit on his labor. Not cool.
My advice: skip the $4.99 Kagi payment and go directly to the Visualhub website to download the updates. I’ll post more at CTTechJunkie.com once I hear back from the parties involved.
UPDATE 12:00 p.m. EDT: VisualHub author Tyler Loch emailed me this morning to say he has a statement prepared but is waiting to hear from Kagi first.
Not that I condone this behaviour, but I think that technically Kagi acts as a ‘reseller’ rather than a ‘payment processor,’ so it is their ‘customer info,’ and Techspansion’s consent is not required in that sense.
Having said that: (allegedly) repackaging/distributing copyrighted code, even as a convenience (with a “convenience fee”) is quite another matter.
If you look at the email, it says at the bottom:
As of June 2011, Visualhub is a trademark of SmartDraw LLC.
Is that who’s pushing them out? Kagi is just a payment processor.
No they’re not involved with it either. Here’s the text of the disclaimer they put on the email:
“As of June 2011, VisualHub is a trademark of SmartDraw, LLC.
Kagi, the vHub Updater and the VisualHub application it updates are not associated with SmartDraw, LLC.”
bother. missed that bit
glad I didn’t pay the $5.