I have been watching with interest as the dispute between EVGA and 'Unwinder', the coder of the RivaTuner tweaking utility, has escalated and each party has issued claims and counter-claims regarding software plagiarism (via Guru3D). The latest turn in this story is that EVGA has agreed to remove its PrecisionX 15 tweaking utility from Steam and will update the program to become genuinely differentiated and original.
"Pretty nasty"
Last week EVGA launched a new build of its PrecisionX tweaking software. This was the first in-house version of the program and it cut ties with the previous developer for this latest version. EVGA said that it has been working over the last six months to remake this utility "built from the ground up". However upon its release many were startled by the new version's similarity to the software which was previously made for EVGA by 'Unwinder'. "It seems that EVGA copied and pasted the entire Rivatuner core feature set and design," wrote Guru3D. Furthermore it reported that EVGA had been "pretty nasty," to copy not just the RivaTuner skin but nearly every detail and stat reported by the previous utility.
Mushroom management
The way that EVGA terminated Unwinder's employment also seems pretty ruthless. He hasn't heard anything from the company directly after a final December 2013 royalty payment was made. He didn't know that was the final payment, it just was. Also he found out that development had been taken in-house after seeing some screenshots of the PrecisionX 15 utility taken at Computex in June.
Following the release of EVGA's "in-house" PrecisionX 15 utility launch on Steam things have developed into a kind of verbal ping pong game. Unwinder has, now that it has been released, had a poke around at the 'new' utility and claims that "Everything is even worse than I expected," with lots of his software design and features "copy pasted" into the new software – "even my original EXE string table is inside new executable as is. Including all the messages of original application, including all the messages of my proprietary USF skin compiler / decompiler built into original RivaTuner skinning engine, even including the references to original RivaTuner core libraries (RTTSH.dll). Even including the messages related to RivaTuner’s G15 LCD output module". Unwinder isn't asking for compensation.
The outcome of the argument, reported just before the weekend, seems to be that EVGA has decided to take down its PrecisionX 15 tweaking utility. However it claims no wrongdoing and that references to 'RivaTuner' in the new app "came from the user interface localization / help" files, which will be fixed. The utility will be removed from Steam while updates are being implemented. (However it takes time to remove things from Steam, so it's still there at the time of writing.)
