Thursday, July 17th 2014
EVGA Allegedly Cuts Out Original Developer of Precision Overclocking App
EVGA allegedly violated the license agreement it held with the original developer of its Precision overclocking and monitoring app, when it developed the latest version of its Precision X 15 app, featuring what it claimed to be a "100 percent in-house" back-end code. EVGA Precision was originally based on RivaTuner codebase, which developer Alex "Unwinder" Nicolaychuk licences out to several major VGA add-in board manufacturers; the more popular being MSI Afterburner. The RivaTuner base, derived from Unwinder's pioneering VGA tweaking app, forms a vast majority of the code of the likes of Precision and Afterburner, with clients going only as far as to innovate shiny skins and UI ideas, or add-on features (ideas), which are then put into code by Unwinder.
Unwinder alleges that the latest version of Precision X, the one EVGA claims to be an in-house development, continues to be largely based on RivaTuner, including the more superficial bits of it, such as user interface dialog control IDs (the way the app takes inputs from the user), and text from the multilingual help system. The installer in which Precision X is packaged, ironically, continues to feature the licence agreement copied over from the older version.
Unwinder states:
Source:
Guru3D
Unwinder alleges that the latest version of Precision X, the one EVGA claims to be an in-house development, continues to be largely based on RivaTuner, including the more superficial bits of it, such as user interface dialog control IDs (the way the app takes inputs from the user), and text from the multilingual help system. The installer in which Precision X is packaged, ironically, continues to feature the licence agreement copied over from the older version.
The most sad and painful thing for me is that the company entirely copy-pasted RivaTuner's unique concepts of displaying data into On-Screen Display. RivaTuner Statistics Server was the first tool in the industry that introduced the concept of in-game hardware monitoring via OSD back in 2005, I spent almost than 10 years on polishing it. And most sad thing for me is that original Precision was not supposed to include such functionality, so it is not included in development budget and royalty fees. I added RTSS to Precision in one of the first versions completely free of any licensing fees just to help the company to promote new tool and it truly became one of the most important application features. So it was used during more than 5 years completely free (and the company was never brave to admit that) and in final they originally "thanked" for free OSD usage by stealing it. EVGA's brand new "in-house" OSD is also open a simple rip of open source FW1FontWrapper overlay. And If I were the developer of FW1FontWrapper, I'd read the story of RTSS and think 1000 times about it.EVGA, in response to the allegations, maintained that "no code was copied," and that it doesn't see a wrongdoing in keeping the user interface consistent (UI) with older versions, since the UI is "100 percent designed by EVGA." It stated:
The original Precision was always a joint effort anyways, some elements were designed by EVGA others were licensed like the RTSS server, and many features were added because EVGA requested it. In this new version we rebuilt all back-end code from scratch. This will allow us to continue to add more features in the future, and not be bound by any "exclusivities."There has been no public release of Precision X 15, yet, and so we cannot verify claims from either side.
48 Comments on EVGA Allegedly Cuts Out Original Developer of Precision Overclocking App
They really really needed to think more before responding. They started off with egg on their faces, now they've put both feet in their mouths with their excuse on why they did an end around on the dev..
PrecisionX 15 is now available btw from EVGA.com.
I find EVGA a little tasteless when these arguments are correct.....
Nice integrity you have supporting them whatever happens, up your standards pls.
w1z you ever had anything like this?
After reading all this sounds like EVGA has went down hill!
So long as MSI continues to offer its for free... little to no damage done to the community while screwing EVGA over. Don't continue to give them code.
The sad part is that I'm sure EVGA won't get anything bad from this. Yeah, a few of us might decide to not buy EVGA cards in the future but I don't think that'd make even a 1% dent in their revenue :( That's why companies have zero qualms about doing stuff like this, what can Unwinder do? He's in Russia and pursuing a legal case in the USA is surely out of his reach ($$$).
and as we have seen in this thread... their followers are cultish and don't care if they steal from others.
So I guess I'm uninstalling precision and replacing it with afterburner later tonight.