Around the 20th October 2021, BMS 4.35 update 3 was released.
For the first time the BMS documents I wrote were changed and modified without the written permission of the original author.
Yet the manuals published alongside the previous release of BMS were always duly copyrighted as the below picture proves. BMS dev knew about this and never asked these copyrights to be changed and thus accepted these terms released as such since BMS 4.33. Therefore they voluntarily breached these copyright notices.
This is the copyright notice of the BMS dash1 for the 4.35 initial release, update1 and update2:
This is the newly released update 3 dash one copyright notice:
It is important to note that Dash-34 and other docs have been changed before update 3 but these documents were not copyrighted the same as they were indeed a teamwork effort from different BMS dev team member, back then under my leadership. So these documents could be changed at will by the BMS dev team.
The dash1, training manual and all the other docs I mentioned in the other article were existing even before being part of BMS and are my intellectual property and claimed as such.
I consider I left BMS a chance long enough to do the right thing and respect the free willing work of contributors.
But a message posted on the new BMS public forum made short work of that hope.
And sure enough a few days after that message being posted, my intellectual property was stolen.
It is sad to see that BMS after being taken out of the shadows with their Falcon 4.0 IP owner agreement is now taking a path back to the dark side by taking ownership of IP material they do not legally own. They had all the chances to make it right.
At this time I haven’t decided on my best course of action. I am recording this first breach of copyright in case I need this in the future.
Fortunately although I feel BMS and the legal IP owner of Falcon 4.0 who let them publish stolen IP, are not acting correctly I still hold the greater good of the community at large higher and I am not taking action against anyone of them at this time – I do feel I have enough proof to do so already but I also feel that if I do there is a risk that BMS might not be available to the community at large.
There is no doubt that I am angry but not angry enough to impact so many people by risking removing their favourite flight sim.
I’m willing to see what is going to happen with the docs and my intellectual property once the next version of BMS is released – whenever that happens.