Project being used in commercial software

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi, Im not perfectly sure but it looks like those guys are selling "pywinauto" 
under another name.
http://www.getautoma.com/

If im wrong (or as a matter of fact that behaviour is rightful) I deeply 
apologize, but their video is exactly same as the video in pywinauto home and 
sincerely I love pywinauto enough as not to want it to go comercial and 
licensed so I couldnt use it in my free open source projects.

Thank you.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by FidelPe...@gmail.com on 23 Apr 2013 at 8:45

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Also apologize because I didnt pick the correct poject type or priority, this 
was my first report. Sry again.

Original comment by FidelPe...@gmail.com on 23 Apr 2013 at 8:46

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi Fidel,

thank you for pointing this out. First of all, a disclaimer: My name is Michael 
Herrmann and I am one of the developers of Automa, which you are referring to. 
At the same time, I am a committer for pywinauto. The original creator of 
pywinauto, Mark Mc Mahon, made me a committer when I wanted to submit a bug fix 
for pywinauto.

pywinauto is licensed under the LGPL, which does not prevent it from being used 
in commercial software. The LGPL (roughly) states that you may use pywinauto in 
any project, provided you make source code modifications publicly available and 
give a notice in your program that you do use it. Automa complies with both of 
these requirements: Its command about() says that it uses pywinauto under the 
LGPL, and we share all source code modifications we make to pywinauto, mostly 
bug fixes, with the community by committing them to pywinauto. In fact, I just 
released a new version of pywinauto (0.4.2) that fixes a bug where a ValueError 
is sometimes raised when querying a HwndWrapper's WindowText().

I understand that you are worried that you will no longer be able to use 
pywinauto in your free open source projects. But there is no need to worry: 
pywinauto is, and always will be, open source. Automa is not simply a 
re-branded version of pywinauto. It uses pywinauto as a library, but includes 
much much more functionality; I would say that given the entire code base, the 
portions of pywinauto in Automa are maybe 5%. We are committed to open source 
software, as you can tell by me replying here and contributing to pywinauto, 
and we have to share the improvements we make to pywinauto with the community 
because of the LGPL. You will always be able to use pywinauto in your projects, 
and through our use and contributions will even be able to get an improved 
version every once in a while.

It is true that the video on getautoma.com is similar to pywinauto's, but it 
really is not the same. Automa's advantage over pywinauto is that it has a 
*much* simpler syntax does not require reference to application-internal IDs 
for identifying GUI elements. For this reason, Automa is not a clone of 
pywinauto but a significant improvement on some of its ideas.

I hope I was able to address your concern. As I said, there is no need to 
worry; you will always be able to use pywinauto and we will keep submitting bug 
fixes to pywinauto like we have in the past year or so. We have no interest in 
making pywinauto "commercial", but we do have an interest in it being 
maintained, because we use it ourselves, so we will keep submitting bug fixes.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me at my email 
address, [my first name].[my last name]@getautoma.com

Thanks,
Michael

Original comment by michael....@open-closure.com on 16 Sep 2013 at 10:54

• Changed state: Invalid