🚀 go-pugleaf

mathew@mantis.co.uk (Industrial Poet) writes:

>why is reimbursement of a GNU program's original author (by means
>of releasing the changed sources) legally required if I *sell* or
>*distribute* modified GNU software, but not if I *use* modified GNU software?

>I'm not damaging the author's income by selling the software, since he
>doesn't want money for it.

Nonsense.  You damage the author in several ways.  For example:

    If your changes contain bugs as they invariably will, users may
    wrongly blame the author, thus hurting the author's reputation; and
    users may send bug reports to the author, thus wasting the author's time.

    If you tell users ``get the vanilla source from the author if you
    want it'' then you are transferring the burden of your user support
    from yourself to the author, thus damaging the author.

    If the author distributes software under the GPL in expectation of
    consulting income from users who need extra features, you directly
    damage the author's income because the author can't fix your version.

    Even if the author doesn't want consulting income, not giving
    proper credit can hurt the author's reputation.


>It seems to me that the FSF likes people to have source code, and dislikes
>people selling software.

You're right about the former point, but have jumped to the wrong
conclusions about the latter.