Help
Welcome to BleepingComputer, a free community where people like yourself come together to discuss and learn how to use their computers. Using the site is easy and fun. As a guest, you can browse and view the various discussions in the forums, but can not create a new topic or reply to an existing one unless you are logged in. Other benefits of registering an account are subscribing to topics and forums, creating a blog, and having no ads shown anywhere on the site.
Title says it all, the application known as `ComboFix', which is developed by bleepingcomputer (As far as I can tell) violates the GPL (v2) license and copyright.
Not wanting to trust an undocumented `black box', wanted to examine what ComboFix actually does before letting it loose on my system, ComboFix.exe is a self-extracting archive which unpacks in C:\ComboFix\.
Among other things, it packs a number of executables, renamed to *.cfexe.
Some of these tools (including, but not limited to, tail.cfexe, sed.cfexe, grep.cfexe, gsar.cfexe) are GPL licensed, the GPL license clearly states that the source must be distributed with the binaries, there is no source to be found anywhere, nor is a copy of the GPL to be found, which is also required.
Other restrictions may also apply.
Looking further I also noticed ComboFix also violated the license for NirCMD, the license requires *all* files in the distribution package to remain together (To quote: ``you must include all files in the distribution package'').
Other files/executables may also be in copyright violation, I did not check every file.
Not wanting to trust an undocumented `black box', wanted to examine what ComboFix actually does before letting it loose on my system, ComboFix.exe is a self-extracting archive which unpacks in C:\ComboFix\.
Among other things, it packs a number of executables, renamed to *.cfexe.
Some of these tools (including, but not limited to, tail.cfexe, sed.cfexe, grep.cfexe, gsar.cfexe) are GPL licensed, the GPL license clearly states that the source must be distributed with the binaries, there is no source to be found anywhere, nor is a copy of the GPL to be found, which is also required.
Other restrictions may also apply.
Looking further I also noticed ComboFix also violated the license for NirCMD, the license requires *all* files in the distribution package to remain together (To quote: ``you must include all files in the distribution package'').
Other files/executables may also be in copyright violation, I did not check every file.
Back to top
