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The person who's violating the GPL is the person who copied and distributed someone else's code (an action that's normally illegal), not the end user.


The GPL doesn't make you give the source out to everyone, look into Redhat Linux, used to be only customers got the source (and rightfully so!) eventually they made it available to everyone would such a company have been violating the GPL all that time? Doubtful... The GPL states that if they have access to the binaries, if the end-user asks for the source it must be made available in some form, even if not directly available. Hence the BMW source request from a year or so ago, and BMW wound up opening up their code to everyone afterwards, but IIRC they sent the first person to request the code a CD of some sort in compliance.

The fun twist is, say I buy GPL'd software whose code is only released to customers cause they're the only ones running the GPL'd software, I have the full rights to re-release the software to anyone and make changes as well. This allows the software to live on.




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