It has come to my attention today that the creator of ToDoList (AbstractSpoon) has, more or less, waged war upon PortableApps.com. It seems as if the developer was having some issues handling support for the app as indicated by his post here. As you can see, he was getting a decent amount of support from other developers/users of PortableApps, but it doesn't seem that the issues were taken any further than this post.

It seems that TodoList was originally released in November of 2003 (according to this page from CodeProject). The developer himself posted on PortableApps.com asking if/how he could get this application into the format and released within the platform. In this post there was a lot of discussion that even led the developer to changing the license to the Eclipse OSI approve OSS license to allow better control and fit within PortableApps.com.

It looks like the first official release on PortableApps.com was back in February of 2011. Since then it has been regularly updated to keep inline with the main app development. And in that time there doesn't seem to be any major issues/complaints in the PortableApps.com forums at all, data issues or otherwise.

However, according to this post from John, the owner of PortableApps.com, there was an issue where the data was being saved in the App folder and not the Data folder as the PortableApps.com PAF (PortableApp Format) specification states should be done. Upon hearing this, an update was released to fix it nearly immediately. However, AbstractSpoon has seem to have taken it upon themselves to run a smear campaign against PortableApps.com. Up to and including a banner at the top of their website stating that their mild fork is a "complete ripoff" of his application, of which is released under a FOSS OSI approved license.

Please note, the "wrapper" that is mentioned above is the same PortableApps.com launcher that is included in every application that is released by PortableApps.com, whether it be Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Skype, Pidgin or others. It is designed to ensure the app continues to function within the constraints of being a portable application, up to and including handling any registry entries that the app may create, on top of any data movement that is needed to conform to the specification.

It seems that AbstractSpoon doesn't understand the purpose of OSS and subsequent licensing. It's sad to see such a bright company/person resort to what they have because of what seems to be an issue that could be easily solved.

In short, should you run into any questions about this situation or any smearing, please take into consideration everything above and know that at every available instance PortableApps.com tried to work with the developer to solve any issues, however they were unwilling to do so amicably.

-Michael

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