[ale] STORY LINK: Vendor slammed for 'selling' patches

[Bob Toxen]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 06:26:20PM +0100, George Carless wrote:
> > When I saw the subject I assumed it was a company selling patchs to
> > Open Source products for a high price, which is a violation of the
> > GPL and hence a copyright violation.  This was not the case.

> Why would it be a violation of the GPL?  If the GPL allows one to sell
> products generally, wouldn't it similarly allow one to sell patches?
It is a violation because the GPL says it's a violation.  We had a thread
on this earlier this year.

To summarize, the GPL is nothing more than a software license that says
what you can do with the copyrighted software.  A copyright prohibits
copying without permission of the copyright owner (with very few exceptions).
The GPL is the owner's permission and says what can be done.

The GPL says that one may charge a reasonable charge for duplicating.  This
generally is interpreted as a reasonable cost for someone's time to copy
and the cost of the media or bandwidth.

> --George

Bob Toxen
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