Patrice Poly > > I have been reading the mail archive and forums about this story, then > went on the FPS website and read their disclaimer. > > >From what I saw, and given that my understanding of GPL and copyrights > might be wrong, here are my thoughts : > > I think what this person(s) do here is *almost* legal. > > They are commercially distributing a GPL software in order to make > profit, which is clearly allowed by the GPL licence, > provided that the seller makes the source code accessible. > > I could find a link to some sources in their disclaimer. > I did not parse the whole provided archive, so I don't know if every bit > of FG sources are here. > I am not sure if providing a download link is enough, or if they should > provide the sources with the commercial CD/DVD they sell. > Also, I don't know if they provide the source with the CD/DVDs. >
I found a link and downloaded the sources. AFAIKS he is offering FG 1.9.1 unchanged in any way that I could discover. So I reckon he's legal. We might take the view that he's doing the marketing that we can't/won't do and spreading FG more widely than we could otherwise achieve. Of course, people would get ripped off. But - caveat emptor - it's not our job to shepherd unwise shoppers. Or we could take a different tack and offer FG for sale at a price that undercuts his wherever and whenever we find FPS. I don't think he could long sustain his effort in the face of that. And we could do with a bit of petty cash. But who would take that one on? With all the tax and accounting implications? Finally, I made a rare visit to our website today. We appear to offer every flightsim for download apart from our own - which was scrolled of the page. Well, FlightSim Pro wasn't there - but give it time. Surely we can do better? Pete Morgan seemed to have a handle on this one. And I can't see why we have suddenly got out knickers in a twist over Google: it's happily underpinned MPMap for years. My tuppence worth. Vivian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
