Yes.
> If a person has five sock-puppet accounts, is that five users or one?
Each of those sock-puppet accounts can request the source, so 5. No wait, it's still a single human being, so 1. Either way, it doesn't matter. They can request the source, and they should get it.
Are users of the service entitled to free-of-charge access to the source code?
No, with limits.
https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide....
>GPLv2 permits “a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution”. This fee must be reasonable.
The answer is complicated.
If I hack into a company and steal a binary for an internal tool (that uses GPL licensed stuff), I can’t demand the source code because I was not authorized to use said binary.
If its a beta not designed to be used by the public, it’s not clear how it will go. The users weren’t authorized to use it but it was easily accessible.
See also: the horrific CFAA Act
Does that fit what we are looking at here?
The way you get paid is not to do the changes until/unless you have some work contract in place beforehand. If you've already made the changes, you mustn't try to get paid for them.
I didn't even notice that all these years.
You can make the changes and charge whatever you want for the software. When the user requests the source code, as is their right, for that you can only charge the physical costs.
The intent is to prevent expensive source code fees from being used as an end-around the source disclosure requirements. It also makes sure the distributor can cover the cosrs, but no more than that.
Right? But since that's a legal document, possible misreadings can end up exploited somehow.
Even something like an ambiguous comma can be at the crux of a dispute
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.htm...
> Yes.
According to what legal doctrine, where, though?
The "user" is a party in the license contract, so that requires a concrete, identifiable legal entity --- or so I would naively think, IANAL and all.
Yes.
> Or could you comply by stating, "for a processing fee of $17,750 USD, we will mail a thumb drive to a real person's residential address"?
The author doesn't have to distribute their clause for free, but I assume there's some clause about not being allowed to charge an outrageous price. More importantly, whoever pays for the initial distribution will be allowed to further distribute it for free.
See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CompanyGPLCostsMon...
If a software robot creates an account, is that a user? Do we owe the source code to the robot? Or to the author of the robot?
Are users of the service entitled to free-of-charge access to the source code? Or could you comply by stating, "for a processing fee of $17,750 USD, we will mail a thumb drive to a real person's residential address"?