Well, here's the section of the GPL that I draw my conclusions from:
(Highlighting added by me of course.)

And, just for the record, here's the section I feel that prevents the makers of Moose from charging a fee of any sort:

I was suggesting they sell their distribution of the binary, under the guise of the cost of support/warrentry. The problem with this plan is they have to release all the source code too.

Limewire gets away with using open source, and still charging for the "pro" version. But equally, there are the people who recomplie limewire sans ads and distribute it as clean limewire without fee.

I think we're agreeing, just not saying it the same way.

I think LimeWire also charges their fee for Pro under the guise of warranty rather than based on the lack of adware.

We are agreeing.... yup. I think it ****** us both off, but it's part and parcel of the gpl, so it has to be accepted.

Would there be any point to an ad-free gpl?

Still, it can be argued that even if the morpheus/gnucleus thing was slightly unexpected (and mildly underhand) it has increased the user-base of gnutella hugely.

Personally I believe we may have problems with the lack of updates for it though. Gnucleus has been updated with ultrapeer support, but I can't use it properly since none of the morpheus/gnucleus 1.6.0.0 clients will become child-nodes to me. Very annoying; I hope they actively contribute to gnucleus rather than forking.

Here's a posting of the GDF on that matter:

From: "Greg Bildson" <gbildson@l...>
Date: Sun Mar 10, 2002 2:37 am
Subject: Gnucleus and the future of Morpheus

One thing that developers should keep in mind is that it appears that Gnucleus is an interim solution for Morpheus. From all the information that I have, it appears that Streamcast will be switching to their own proprietary code base in 3 weeks or likely (much) more. I expect that Streamcast really doesn't want to maintain their client as open-source for the ongoing future. Now, they may have changed their mind but I doubt it. They are likely content for the time being to stick with Gnucleus because it works very well for them given the effort involved in customizing it. I also assume that Gnucleus will continue to have a large user base going forward.

Streamcast claims to be implementing all the basic Gnutella features as well as metadata searches and some other more recent proposals. One slight concern that I have is that they claim to be using slightly different metadata that includes some of their old fields from FastTrack but any improvement in the metadata area is probably worth it. I believe that they will be working on UltraPeers as well. Actually getting all this code right will be tricky for them. It is a big question mark as to how this will all fit into the Gnutella network in the future.

I think it would be very wise for them to release early betas to the GDF so that we can validate their implementation. They can probably get a lot of free work out of some of us.

Thanks
-greg

My problem is with the "appears to be"... They haven't even told the community...

From a post on gnuclues forums:

Swabby, one of gnucleus developers....


Probably? That's what worrys me....

Oh well, just block block block .

I tend to get bunches of morpheus clients, I am starting to suspect they cluster as well.

Is their source open (I guess it is) - has anyone read it to see what they mod'd?

Nos

The Moose is on the loose!

Instead of adware we opted for serial number protection. When you pay to use the program, you get a serial number and can then operate the client.
Testing has been ongoing for the pre alpha version and the serial number code is working great.
We have invested enough to hire 2 full time programmers for the short term and hope the low cost fee will support further improvements.
For those of you who asked, the Moose is almost exactly like BearShare in operation look/feel. We should be able to ad new features and improvements quickly because we have a staff of programmers, rather than only one like BearShare has. Gnucleus 1.7 features were just added.

Use the Moose!

Unless I'm missing something, you have to release the source code to your client, upon which I can simply disable any serial number check... Erm, hello.. your business model is screwed.

They do have the source code somewhere on their website. - As far as I can tell, they did not bother to make a single change to the core (even the lack of comments is the same as before). But Gnucleus source-code is no fun to read, so I might have overlooked some small but important changes.