/tech/ - Technology

None of the proceeds are going towards the original authors or FSF, so fuck them.

might not be a nice thing to do., but as long as they provide the source it is legal.

anyone who is too stupid to pirate software or just use a free alternative deserves it.

An unfortunate abuse of copyleft. Not really fixable without opening a legal can of worms worse than this situation, though.

I'm also kinda disappointed about the thread. I thought from the title that it would be about non-gratis free software.

You are not just paying for the software. You also pay for packaging, documentation, support, etc.

Is the license correctly provided?

>>544208

>How do you guys feel about this?

Just fine.

>It just looks like some people have just copied LibreOffice or OpenOffice and are selling it as their own software to the naive.

That's not accurate. They appear to offer the software on a physical medium and sell it it retail stores. That's important to old codgers who can't download software without getting malware on their computers, and to people living with poor Internet connectivity/speeds, which I would imagine is lots of people in Australia, which is where these people seem to do business.

In addition, they offer support to their customers through email, phone, and post. You know, like Redhat and Oracle do? It's a common practice that is almost universally accepted in the open source and free software worlds.

They include the licenses for the software on the website and note that you can install the software on as many computers as you want, get the source code, redistribute it, whatever. So they're complying with the licenses.

>Thoughts?

The only problem I have with this is that they say that it's compatible with MS Offfice, which isn't true, unless they've made improvements on LibreOffice. Because LibreOffice is only *mostly* compatible with MS Office. Basically, if you're just creating and printing documents, or sharing simple documents and spreadsheets with people, you'll probably be fine. But if you have to collaborate with people using MS Office doing anything but the simplest stuff, you're fucked. You'll have font and formatting problems, track changes doesn't work right, etc.

If programmers have a problem with people making money off their work, they shouldn't use GPL, LGPL, Apache, or other licenses that permit people to do that.

>>544220

As for the original authors, if they cared, they shouldn't have released their software under licenses that permit the sale of the software by other people.

Why should the FSF get any money from the sale of free software that has nothing to do with the FSF? Are they like some kind of free software mafia boss that gets a cut of any free software "action"?

Get real.

I don't know or care much about this particular thing, so I can't say whether or not its developers actually changed anything but the icons. However, repackaging Free software and slapping a pricetag on it without any significant effort being put in or contributions back to the community isn't that rare. I know that people on /tech/ tend to hate all mobile devices, so some of you might not be aware of this, but stuff like this is actually extremely common among Android (and other mobile OS) app "developers". Very, very often you see software for Android which is just one of the AOSP programs bundled with ads, usually also with an ad-free "donation" version available for a few dollars. You also often see some that are very obviously just copies of GPL software provided with no source or mention of its original authors, being sold or bundled with ads to make a quick buck off of some idiots. It usually only seems to work well when it's being presented to the lowest common denominator of computer users, ie the sort of people who rely on app stores on mobile devices.

So long as the "developer" provides the source code, and doesn't use any of the original author's copyrighted/trademarked logos (or whatever else), copyleft doesn't prevent this. It's extremely immoral, but doesn't actually violate the license.

>>544289

>I'm also kinda disappointed about the thread. I thought from the title that it would be about non-gratis free software.

Same here. Non-gratis Libre software is very uncommon, RHEL being the only major example I can think of. It's always nice to have a few examples to fall back on to help dispute the misconception that Free software is somehow communism or anti-free-market.

>>544289

>>544305

some examples here:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2016-02/msg00227.html