Gadget Software: the controversies continue to swirl

After our coverage of Gadget Software products yesterday, several readers wrote to point out the discussion of this company in the latest issue of the Macintosh Weekly Journal. In this article, MWJ accuses Gadget Software of stealing code. Specifically: "Just days after we exposed Gadget Software's Faster! 2.0 as consisting of little more than code stolen from Orchard Software's CPU Doubler, the outfit liberally borrowed code from another prominent Macintosh utility, repackaged it with their own copyright notice, and released it to the public. This time, the culprit is WindowApp 1.0. WindowApp 1.0, to put it mildly, liberally borrows code from ApplWindows, Hiro Yamamoto's freeware utility that does the same thing, except Hiro Yamamoto actually wrote his program." The article continues with details of the evidence behind these claims. While we have not investigated these claims ourselves, we know and respect the MWJ. They are rarely wrong in such matters. MacFixIt readers are also probably aware of the controversy surrounding Faster! that we covered here previously (see this Forums thread for example). We continue to ponder this entire matter, but given all of these issues, it is hard to justify continued coverage of Gadget Software here at MacFixIt.