Stellarium

Stellarium being sold on eBay

Asked by swskitso

I recently received this program from a seller on ebay
Does anyone hold rights to this product or is it open to market freely?
I have not contacted ebay about my concerns yet as I wanted to ensure my suspicions correct
but usually a cdr labeled in sharpie is a good sign of piracy
please respond with what information you can and if someone holds the rights I will gladly guide you to the seller
because regardless of that I paid $9 and waited two weeks for something I could have downloaded free in minutes

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Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#1

Stellarium is free/open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html

This doesn't prohibit anyone from selling it, as long as they follow the terms of the GPL. This may or may not be the true in your case. Not mentioning that the product can be downloaded for free is unethical in all cases.

None of the people who try to sell Stellarium on eBay are in any way connected to Stellarium's team.

This has happened to other free/open source products, for example The GIMP:
http://www.gimp.org/about/selling.html
and Blender:
http://www.blendernation.com/selling-blender-on-ebay/
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/press/re-branding-blender/

The advice I can offer is generally the same: If the terms of the GPL are broken (e.g. copyright information has been removed), complain to eBay (report that vendor). If not, you can ask the vendor for a refund and give them a low rating, describing the problem.

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Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#2

I have changed the title of the question.

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