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Hi all, I am feeling a bit annoyed at the moment as a peice of software i use to use has suddenly become totaly closed source/commercial. Now the software was never GPL or anything like that but it was free and the source was avaible, there use to be a good community on yahoo groups for its support but all this has slowly been removed. The software is written by a single author (although they do rely on some other bits) and the comapny they work for has assimilated the software so they can charge money for it. They are charging in a clever way you need to buy "support" then you can access the download page where it is free. I think the minimum support is $4000 yes 4 thousand dollars. I am extra annoyed as i contributed some very useful parts to this software (mostly bolting on LUA scripting). Luckly i still have a copy of the prog but not any recent source code. I hope i have horribly misunderstood the situation (which is why i will not give the name or web address) but i think i should investigate just how much the software is integrate with LUA and a third-partys software as these might be GPL licenced and therefor the main app might now be breaking the GPL. I think the GPL may be intact by the fact that a "demo" version is avaible but this lacks one important (external) component that is required to do anything useful with the software. The external component is a finite element solver and is totaly standalone , processing output files of the system and the solver dosn't use any GPL code or libs so i think they have won :-( That will learn me not to specificly put GPL headers on the top of my contributed source code! -- Robin Cornelius --------------------------------------------------- robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx GPG Key ID: 0x729A79A23B7EE764 http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x729A79A23B7EE764
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