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Comment by octaveguin | Hacker News Reader

There was quite a common scam a while ago about selling open office.

It actually was completely legal because they were (in the fine print) selling support - the software was free, of course.

A lot of bigger companies sell support for OSS products they don't build. This can be legitimate. It just depends on how forthright you are with who built what.

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They don't have to sell support. One is allowed to sell open-source software. (One of course has to comply with any relevant license requirements when distributing).

Right. Copyleft licenses (the GPL and the like) only require you keep software free as in freedom, not as in beer. You can sell the software just fine, so long as you provide the source.

And non-copyleft licenses let you do whatever you want. You can take non-copyleft open-source software, add your proprietary junk and sell it at a killing, if you want. You don't even have to provide the source.

You sound like selling an open source software someone else made is inappropriate. Apparently nothing is wrong with that as long as the license is applied.

What's inappropriate here is he did not allow his clients to redistribute and modify the source even though his work is based largely on an open source project.

It is inappropriate to imply that the value you provide is both development and support, when you only provide support.

Especially in a consumer context, where support is usually a small fraction of the cost.

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