twaelti | # 61 | 2010-10-24, 06:44 | Report

Two lines of thought from me:

1. Donations don't work. I can assure you.
2. What if Stellarium Mobile is kind of a wrapper around Stellarium? Or an improved repackaging (optimiized configs etc.)? The source for Stellarium is (was?) GPL and is also available as such, but if the original author "rewrote" the critical parts or optimized parts for the Mobile version that were originally his works anyway, it's not so easy anymore. Remember that the author of Stellarium Mobile is the main author of Stellarium (by a large amount)

And yes, I'm gonna buy it right now. Fantastic app.

niqbal | # 62 | 2010-10-24, 07:30 | Report

damn, quite a bit of price difference. I paid US $1.6 (tax incl.) for the app. Its worth it. To my understanding; under GPL, every modified version has to be kept free too as long as its publically shared in some way. So If i am not wrong, Nokia and Fabien might be the one in violation here. Unless Dev. made this app from scratch by himself.

v13 | # 63 | 2010-10-24, 07:59 | Report

While I'm a huge fan of FOSS and I won't buy stellarium until its source code becomes available (no matter what may happen in the future, currently it is GPL'd), I disagree with the above statement.

Allowing intermediates to get money is the incentive for having intermediates. Of course the author could accept payments by himself, but isn't it great that (e.g) paypal exists and makes transactions easier? IMO paypal actually increases the money a developer gets even if the developer pays a fee to paypal.

Same thing for repositories. Nokia for example could actually help developers in the effort to earn money from OVI. Developers of course may choose to accept direct contributions as well or make the program available for free. Even in that case, many people would buy from OVI store if it wasn't such a c%@p.

It would be better to not confuse "free beer" with "free speech". The benefits of opensource are far beyond the price. The true benefits include:

• The ability for people without access to OVI store or credit card to get the program
• The ability for people to debug and extend the program
• The fact that if/when the current developer becomes mad (e.g. theo de raadt), the program won't be dead
• The fact that if Nokia chooses to end support for N900, maemo.org could keep supporting it

etc...

ZogG | # 64 | 2010-10-24, 08:21 | Report

there are no violations of selling it, but if it's GPL they need to provide code, that's all. as well stop crying about piracy, i think it's important to pay indie authors the price for their work, so if i need such application and i have choice to download/buy, i would buy. a lot of you think it's important for this up, than buy it, or you say it's harder for you to buy when you see the link for free download, than it's your own problem. As well author got price for the first place in contest, when most people offered free and opensource apps there. and i'm not sure if he put the program on OVI as Nokia by giving price had some copyrights on it or something like that. he also not provided the program for a long time after he won. (that as far as i know)

benny1967 | # 65 | 2010-10-24, 09:02 | Report

well, you explained in detail yourseld why simply re-distributing the binary of GPLed software is illegal: you may of course re-distribute the application, but only under certain conditions. if these conditions aren't met, it's illegal. matan and others explained in detail how the way ovi store distributes the application does violate the gpl. therefore, redistributing what the ovi store distributes can hardly be legal.

AgogData | # 66 | 2010-10-24, 09:43 | Report

can someone tell me why the so-called free and mobile version which is available in extra devel is 42 MB and the full version which is not free is only 21 MB ?

Ken-Young | # 67 | 2010-10-24, 10:01 | Report

I agree, Stellarium is a far more impressive program than my little orrery program. However, you might want to keep both - Stellarium constantly refreshes the screen, and chews up about 85% of the available CPU time. The orrery program only refreshes the sky view once per minute (because, the sky just doesn't change much faster than that), so the orrery will run down your battery much more slowly. If you're out in the country star gazing, that could be a plus.

object | # 68 | 2010-10-24, 11:45 | Report

Hi benny1967, you don't know what you are talking about, thank you.

object | # 69 | 2010-10-24, 11:48 | Report

It's not a full version in ovi, it is an optimized version which have a lot of improvement in the interface.

mmurfin87 | # 70 | 2010-10-24, 14:51 | Report

If you guys really like the application, you should buy it from the Ovi store.

If you don't, the developer will be unable to continue to work on it.

Redistributing it for free is just being a douchebag.