My personal opinion on copyright is that it is invalid and may only be enforced on those who attempt to claim their own copyrights. Any party releasing binaries that do not follow the license that comes with the code have, in my opinion, given up all copyright in anything they do as demonstrated by their actions.
DGA has received his payment and as such has not been harmed by these actions.
Because copyright is invalid, I cannot blame them for their actions unless they are shown to be hypocritical. That said, I would consider everyone who uses these binaries and believes in copyright to also be hypocritical.
I also believe that the free market solution to resolving these kinds of disputes is to simply refuse to do business with these individuals if they are found to be hypocritical in this manner.
The other solution is to undercut them, copy their binaries and modify the payment address inside the binary to be the ANGEL address, provide a proxy that intercepts their packets and rewrites the payment address, or some other solution that destroys their market advantage. Remember, they have no copyright and by doing so you are not stealing anything from them.
Bytemaster, I have to totally disagree. This discussion is not about copyright and credits. It's about copyleft.
And I have to agree in all points with the thread starter. These licenses are not enforcing copyright and restricting the usage and distribution, in opposite, they encourage to do so as long as you respect the terms and conditions which include to release all work based on the code under same open source standards as defined in the license.
Speaking as one of said authors, I think there are really two issues: What the licenses say, and what the community wants.
I released my code under a license that permits redistribution and reuse in binary form without providing the source. The Bitcoin source is similar. There are some restrictions -- namely, that the license file be included -- but, honestly, little violations of that are the least of anyone's concern.
In other words, in my read of it, what the binary releasers are doing is entirely within both the letter and the spirit of the licenses that I and the other developers chose.
But I'll admit that I was naive in choosing that license. :-) It feels a little funny to see people taking my code, repackaging it, and doing what is effectively selling it. But as Bytemaster points out, I was paid for it, and I had the option of taking other approaches. I think that were I to do it again, I would have selected a GPL-style copyright to require source redistribution to provide continued benefits to the community source code. But I often choose to release my code under Apache knowing that such reuse is a possibility. As an academic, I typically want my code to have impact, whether or not it's binary or open.
Then there's the question of the community and expectations, and here I'm completely with you: I'd strongly encourage people to vote with their feet and pick the open source options over the closed builds, for a variety of reasons -- not the least of which is trust!
This addresses only the question of my own copyright (and the inherited copyright from ptsminer, which draws from protoshares, and back to bitcoin). The question of Earthbound's copyright on his windows-related modifications is entirely separate, and if he didn't release his code under a permissive license, then the binary builds are, in fact, in violation. IANAL, of course, but I think that the real answer is not to get legal about it but for people to make the right votes with their feet.
Of course, that raises the question: How do you give people enough information to do that voting in an informed way? Sounds like some marketing to be done, of which this thread may be the start.
-Dave
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