[conspire] The old stealth licence change trick

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> TACO (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out) was Christopher Soghoian's 
> Firefox extension, released under the open source Apache Public License
> 2.0, that stuffs a bunch of protective HTML cookies into Firefox (or
> MSIE) to pre-empt a bunch of the more notorious tracking cookies.
[...]
> Uninstalling TACO makes your browser open a tab to
> http://www.abine.com/feedback.php .

Just to be clear, I did do the upgrade from TACO to Abine Privacy Suite,
noticed the proprietary licensing soon thereafter, and removed the sucker.

Before I did, I wandered around the new controls, and noticed the
_other_ thing I wanted to mention:  The proprietary codebase is
baroquely overfeatured and overengineered, in a way that the earlier 
open source one just wasn't.  And this is really typical:  Some guy puts
out open source versions, often based on a college project or scratching
a local itch.  Those are fine, but then he/she thinks 'Hey, I can turn
this into a proprietary [they usually say 'commercial'] program, dump a
huge bunch of new features into it, and make serious money.'  Which is
one way decent programs, especially modest little utilities, get ruined
-- because coders know that the standard proprietary software market
tends to value software products based on how many bullet points there
are in the feature list.

Fortunately, TACO didn't do anything essential.  If it did, someone
could have just adopted and forked the last APL 2.0 release, but in this
case it doesn't really matter.