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A comment on Call Yourself A Hacker, Lose Your 4th Amendment Rights. Parent comment

Re:Call Yourself A Hacker, Lose Your 4th Amendment Rights by reginaldjcooper on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @02:06AM (#6597196)
Source: BSD and MIT-licensed software.

(Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can charge for GPL software, you just cannot charge for the source once they've got a binary. You also can use your own fork of GPL on your hardware without releasing any source.)

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Re:Call Yourself A Hacker, Lose Your 4th Amendment Rights by nitrogen on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @03:17AM (#6597372)
You can charge a reasonable distribution/duplication fee for GPL source code. The early FSF funded itself by selling several hundred dollar copies of GNU (apparently that took a lot of tapes back then).

See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...

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Re:Call Yourself A Hacker, Lose Your 4th Amendment Rights by mpyne on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @10:29AM (#6598923)
> You also can use your own fork of GPL on your hardware without releasing any source.

I believe this is no longer true (at least in general) as of GPL v3. In fact this "Tivoization" is one of the very things the GPLv3 was intended to combat.

Software-as-a-Service is another thing they were aiming at... I don't know offhand if it made it into GPLv3 or not.

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