Two weeks ago we received an email from a user who had been sold a copy of The Gimp (an image editing program) on a leading on-line trading website, without realising that he could have downloaded it from the project’s homepage at no cost. When he complained to the seller, he basically got laughed at.
Although this does not look very ethical, in fact what the seller did is (quite likely) perfectly legal. The Gimp is distributed under the GPL. This means that the software is free in a “freedom” sense, but not that it has to be provided for free. In fact, the GNU project’s position about selling free software is clear:
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
Free software is quite unusual in that it is written by somebody who uses his copyright ownership to grant others the right to do with it as they please, as long as it remains being free software. And this includes selling it for any amount of money.
In most cases free software projects release their programs for free. If they did not, somebody could buy a copy and then redistribute it at no cost. Free software business models focus instead on other revenue streams, e.g. selling support to customers. Unfortunately, the seller was not trading in this case on a product or service but on the lack of awareness of the buyer.
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