Re: [tlug] GPL vs. paid version and ethics

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > It isn't a completely unrelated company (which can legally happen,
 > I think -- that is, a company can take someone else's GPL'ed
 > software and fork off an improved version and sell that).

Sure, happens all the time.  Eg, XEmacs (then called Lucid Emacs, part
of Lucid's advanced IDE), Netscape browser and server (the NCSA
licenses were not GPL, though), some versions of Unix based on BSD
(not GPL), Apple's compilers (GCC, although arguably they're not
selling it), FreeBSD and Mach (the OS part of Mac OS X, again not
GPL), NeoOffice (Mac version of OpenOffice; it's no longer easy to
download it without paying for it -- AFAIK this is GPL).  I believe
there are a lot of companies that sell various versions of the Linux
kernel for embedded use, too.

It is harder to take a GPLed software commercial, of course.