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A new flightsim?


johnost

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Thanks guys - I suspected that was it, but the new name threw me. Jim, that ADX site is very useful, we should all support it, even with scam programs that are not directly associated with flightsim, but maybe they don't want to expand their policy.
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Mind you, even FlightGear has to admit it's an ethical, not a legal issue.

 

The GNU GPL license, under which FlightGear is released, allows reselling under certain terms. The main issue that FlightGear developers have is the misleading marketing tactics used by pro flight sim that target unsuspecting users who aren't yet familiar with FlightGear. This is primarily an ethical, not a legal issue.

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I get that, but am surprised that commercial use of other peoples' work is legal!

 

The main point of the GPL is to make sure the source is available to everyone, at least in theory (some clauses in the GPL don't always work for commercial software). For some it's a philosophical ideal, but for many it's a way to avoid situations such as commercial companies dropping support for older software and forcing people to upgrade, or not adding features or fixing bugs that affect them. With the source code available to the user, they can do this on their own. To make money from open source software, you would need to add value elsewhere, much like IBM, Google, Red Hat and others have done over the years.

 

In this case, however, the person selling this sim is taking advantage of, and abusing the GPL purely for profit while adding little to the original project. With previous cases they have taken screenshots from commercial FSX and X-plane developers for use on their own site, and buried references to the original Flightgear project and how to get a copy of the source code. It's all of these other actions that really make this questionable.

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