Selling freeware on ebay?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kevin Deschwazi
  • Start date Start date
I e-mailed him:

Any reason why you're selling GPL-licensed, free software? If you're going to rip off Audacity, at least change the icon.
Click to expand...

He might have added some little mundane crap to it, since it's open source. But come on. I think that's stupid.

At least he's only charging 7.50 pounds for it. I have heard of other people "selling" Fedora Core disks, with the intention of selling their services more than the OS itself. But this is different.
 
So is it legal then? I emailed him as well asking about additional functionality on top of Audacity. I also emailed the folks at Audacity.

This kind of thing really pisses me off.
 
According to the GNU Public Licence, you are allowed to charge a fee for 'distributing' open source software, as long as you make the source code freely available (I think you might even have to include the source code, not sure).

Even if he has modified the program, he still has to provide the source code for free, as it is a work derived from Audacity. Its the same rule that lets linux distributions charge heaps for boxed sets, but users can download the same software for free.

So unless he's not supplying the source code, he's not doing anything wrong. Sure he's an asshole for decieving people like that, but yeah. I've seen the same thing on Aussie ebay. If he's claiming that it's propietry software then he is breaking the law.
 
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