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I'm having a hard time figuring out how forking a project placed under the BSD license by its developers can be "cheat"ing those same developers.

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If the sole purpose of forking is to circumvent the $2 price tag, and not to implement new features yourself, then how is it not cheating them?

As I said, you can compile your own copy without forking and without paying. But forking with the sole intention of making easier for others to avoid paying is poor form, if permitted by the license.

I contributed based on it being an open source license; if some group decides to change that so they can make money off it, forking and keeping it free is not "cheating them" - it's keeping them from cheating me and every other dev who has helped them.

It's no more cheating the developers than I'm cheating the government by taking every tax deduction available to me.

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