Forking Public GitHub Code that is also Sold as a Complied App

Posted by Ryan Castillo on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ryan Castillo
Published on 2011-03-01T13:59:30Z Indexed on 2011/03/01 15:25 UTC
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licensing

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ethics

I found a public repo on GitHub that I would like to play around with. I can see myself potentially spending a lot of time writing tests for it and expanding its functionality. The code is also being sold as an app.

I have no problem with this because I admire the owner's practice of sharing his source and also providing the convenience of paying for the app for users who don't want to mess with compiling it.

If I was to spend time with this code as a separate fork what would prevent the owner from merging it with his master branch? Is it ethical for him to still profit off of my added functionality? Should a line be drawn somewhere?

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