webfork wrote: ↑Wed Jun 19, 2019 5:37 am
deathcubek wrote: ↑Mon Jun 17, 2019 10:04 am
The problem here is that, even though it is morally reprehensible to offer "payed" downloads of OpenSource software that can easily be obtained for free, doing so probably is perfectly legal
For example, the GPL explicitly allows everybody to redistribute the software
and to (optionally) take a fee for that. Permission from the original author(s) is
not needed.
Not entirely. The vast majority of software is protected by standard copyright and, although you can license your source code however you wish, copyright still applies to many of the program's compoents e.g. images, trademark name, etc. You cannot just copy-paste the entire program without resolving those. You can see a great example of how this was done some years ago with the Icecat project (
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/), which was intended as a more GNU-license friendly version of Firefox.
Well, the copyright still belongs to the original authors. But, with the GPL or similar license, the copyright owner gives permission to
everyone to freely redistribute and/or modify the software. And even to take a "fee" for redistribution.
There usually are some restrictions, such as the requirement to redistribute the software under the same conditions as the original, the requirement to publish the modified source codes, and the requirement to
not remove the copyright/license information.
But, as long as those requirements are followed, the redistribution requires
no further approval from the copyright owner.
And yes, trademarks may
not be covered by the software license – to the good or to the bad. As you mention, Mozilla didn't allow to use their registered trademark "Firefox" for 'unofficial' builds if Firefox, so Debian's "Iceweasel" and GNU's "IceCat" were born.
After all, redistributing OpenSource software in the M$ Store with a different name and/or logo may be grossly misleading to the user, but legally it probably is the "right" thing to do
webfork wrote: ↑Wed Jun 19, 2019 5:37 amHowever, after Microsoft's change of heart to support open source and their extraordinary investment in Github and other projects should mean they disallow entry by these programs to their store as a matter of policy, whatever the legality. This would again require very little effort to prevent distribution of simple copy-paste programs.
Yeah, but what exactly would that policy be?
Clearly, we want OpenSource projects to be able to offer their software in the store. It's quite legitimate for OpenSource projects to say "if you want to support our work, then buy it from the store. Otherwise you can grab it for free at our GitHub site".
But then, what the "copycat" guys are doing is pretty much the same thing – from a policy point of view
