PiHole — a perfect example of why attribution licenses are essential

As I’m sure we’re all familiar, PiHole is a FOSS network-level ad blocker. You install it on as little as a $5 Pi Zero, and set it as your DNS server. As network traffic flows through it, it filters out and kills the ads and tracking requests based on your chosen filter lists. Install two of them and they act as fallbacks for each other. All of this, provided for free by the developers. Imagine, then, with this knowledge, you come across something like “1coolbox”

Your “box” to Website Security — 1coolbox

Look familiar? It’s a Raspberry Pi in a cheap plastic case. It gets worse:

The 1coolbox dashboard

The pihole dashboard

Unless you haven’t figured it out, 1coolbox is a direct copy of PiHole. And, it gets even better! According to this reddit thread, it retails for $400. If PiHole had used an attribution license, like CC-BY-SA, the “creators” of 1coolbox would need to give credit to PiHole, and it’s creators.