It's a pity to see a professional software go to waste. but Linux is free software, and a source code is free. You can find the sources of lite in the original site, so I guess this is not a legal issue. It's just a bit of good old marketing.
There is a paper on the subject in arxiv which I just read but it does not affect my view. I think that it's a rather interesting research project. I know that it has been developed for pure research, but it doesn't mean that it is "not useful". Besides, it's free and not against the copyleft concept (even if I'm not sure that the goal of the project is to create non-free software). But it can be also used for other non-free stuff (just like you can use your car for a simple purpose).
A:
The issue is, IMO, copyright. Software is not a separate category from other works protected by copyright; by definition it's part of a copyright work. Without the copyright owner's permission, a software programmer can't put it in their finished work (a program), so it's copyrightable under normal circumstances. And if you "don't mind" it being copyrighted, then why do you want to protect it at all?
This means that if you offer to sell a compiled version of a program with your name, then your "we'll just take the source code" provision is invalid, but if you distribute the program's source code freely and only compile it on a customer's request then the copyright system doesn't apply. The result is that you are free to do any work you want with a program, but you can't sell it to anyone else.
This has nothing to do with licensing, which is another form of copyright protection. There are a number of ways to distribute your work under a license that will make it legal to sell copies of your program, but without license terms the work is still copyrightable and the copyright owner can require you to cease selling the software you've compiled.
What about this: If I want to distribute my open source implementation of a program, why do I have to make my source code public? I could just distribute my compiled version of the program and not make my source code public. That would be much easier.
The reason is because it's an implemention of a program, not a program, so your implementation is also a derivative work
Related links:
Kommentare