BOINC@Poland published a statementof their point of view: FreeHAL@home statement

Due to the recent happenings [1] in FreeHAL@home, BOINC@Poland would like to present team's point of view in the following statement:


BOINC@Poland have never encouraged cheating. Our policy was always to play fair.
BOINC@Poland members did use modified BOINC clients, that let them run more than one instance of FreeHAL@home application.
In our opinion this does not constitute cheating. The project's application was not modified, returned results were valid, and amount of credits requested per work unit was not changed.
We also did not break FreeHAL@home project rules, as at that time, no rules forbidding such actions existed.
We do agree that this may be regarded as an unfair advantage over other FreeHAL@home members. Note however, that same can be said of using optimised project applications. Also, running more tasks at once requires more system resources.


As far as we can tell, we did not violate GNU GPL license on which BOINC client is distributed
All users that decided to run the modified client knew, that it was a derivative work based on official BOINC client, and as such is distributed as GNU GPL
The details of modified source code were released as soon as it was demanded.


Even if GNU GPL was violated, this does not make running modified clients illegal. GNU GPL covers the obligations of person distributing modified application. It does not cover on what conditions software can be used.
We understand however, that project's staff can forbid using such clients on their discretion.



Having said that, we would like to apologize to all BOINC community members, who felt cheated by our actions.

We feel that calling us cheaters on front page was a bit too harsh and too quick action on project administrator's side. Had he contacted us either via FreeHAL forums, BOINC@Poland's forums, or directly to team founder, we would gladly comply to his requests.

Thankfully Tobias agreed to put a link to this statement, as a chance for us, to explain our position. We are very grateful for that. Thank you, Tobias.

The lesson we have learned from this as a team, is that we will now try to have closer contact with admins of projects, where we use any kind of optimisations. Hopefully this will prevent such unpleasant situations in the future.

On behalf of BOINC@Poland team, Mchl (founder)