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Comment by Strom | Hacker News Reader

The Free Software Foundation has the following to say. [1]

> 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. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

So this “no selling” talk is defintely a diverging perspective and does not apply to all open source licenses. In fact I think it can’t apply to any, because commercial use is a freedom that would be restricted if it were true.

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[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

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You are required, as that page notes, to include the source code at no additional charge whenever you sell or otherwise distribute the software. Unless you're charging for the source without providing working binaries at all, this is the same thing as setting the price of the source at zero.

You're also unable to restrict those who purchase your software from redistributing it:

> You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html )

That is enough to ensure that open source code is provided to the world for free. This is why we have a distinction between "open source" and "source available".

> That is enough to ensure that open source code is provided to the world for free.

Not necessarily, the people you distribute the source/binaries to are under no obligation to give them to anyone else.

In its early days, the FSF used to send out tapes with “GNU” and charged (considerable, if fair) fees for media and labour, because FTP access was difficult to come by outside academic circles. The webpage can’t be that old (the web itself being younger), but still dates from the times when it might have made sense to buy a consumer Linux distro in a store, as a bunch of CDs in a box (I still have mine somewhere).

In the world of pervasive broadband and cheap hosting, I don’t think this business model could work—everybody you release your stuff to will just upload it to a public site. Red Hat will terminate the support contract in that case, which to me feels like a legal exploit I’m kind of conflicted about.

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