FlightGear needs your help!

[geneb]

Since about 2009, the FlightGear project has been plagued by a scammer that has taken the 1.9.1 version of FlightGear, rebranded it as as "Pro Flight Simulator" and is selling it for a ton of money. The prices I've seen are anywhere from $47 to $135 each.

A lot of unsuspecting people are being taken in by this scam and we need your help to stop them.

What they're doing is _technically_ legal because if you dig hard enough, you can find a source code archive of what they're supposedly selling.

Because the FlightGear project is an all-volunteer open source project, we don't have the resources to really hammer these guys.

What we need you to do is search for instances of "proflightsimulator" or "pro flight sim" on YouTube and Facebook. When you find one, please flag it as spam/scam and leave a comment pointing out that it's nothing more than a shady, re-badged version of a VERY old version of FlightGear.

For those interested in the FlightGear project, please head over to http://www.flightgear.org. The site has recently had a huge update and version 2.4.0 was released a few weeks ago.

Thanks for your time.

Gene Buckle, keeper of the FlightGear Build Server (http://flightgear.simpits.org:8080)

[Joe Lavery]

Hi Guys,

We at PC Pilot were aware of this scam and a mention of it was made in our internal forum recently, I'm on holiday at the moment but when I return I'll speak to the editor and get him to contact you. Perhaps we can put it on our news page and warn many thousands of prospective "customers".

It's definately not right that unscrupulous people should be able to profit on the backs of hard working folk.

Regards
Joe Lavery

[geneb]

That would be fantastic Joe, thank you very much! Here's the faq that the project has put together about this whole mess:

http://www.flightgear.org/flightprosim.html

g.