7.7.2016 7.25 pm Vladimír Čunát <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> As mentioned, paying for freely-licensed SW (as accepted by FSF or OSI)
> is always possible but can *never* be forced (legally), so I don't think
> we should make it *appear* as obligatory.
>
For GPL software, the rule is that it is fine to demand payment for giving a copy and refuse to give a copy if a payment is not made. The GPL also includes the condition that if the binary is distributed to someone, access to the corresponding source has to be provided to the same people.
What is not allowed is forbidding recipients to redistribute their copies or requiring a royalty to do so. So, if a single customer has obtained a copy in one way or another, it would be allowed to publish that copy for everyone to fetch for free.
Basically, any distributor can require a payment, and if users are not willing to pay, they would have to find some other way to obtain the software.
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