The author does give his email address on the site, and one of the terms and
conditions in the license is Send me a mail tell me what you think of the
program [sic].
The program, however, is not mentioned at all on the site. You should also
note that it is not under the GPL, but a
Try politely asking for the source code. If they give it to you under the
same permissive license, the program is free software to you, and you can
give the code to others to make it free software to them.
A program's author has released it under a permissive free license, but
hasn't made the source code available. Does this mean it isn't free software?
/* A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential
freedoms:
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* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your
computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a
But I can always decompile it to get the source, so in a way you always have
access to the source code.
Decompiling does not produce the original logic. You can disassemble a binary
software with good results, but you can't decompile something to a higher
level language. You will always lose original information, and this practice
is almost always illegal.
It wouldn't be illegal if the program is under a free license.
Think about it like this: wouldn't you rather have access to the original
source code, than having to decompile it?
Like I said, you will not look at the original code when you decompile. See
http://stackoverflow.com/a/14266904
And there's a difference between the source code being available or
undisclosed.
It depends how you interpret but hasn't made the source code available .
Usually source code is available live-on-the-web or ftp and this is
preferred, so people can download and examine it with no waiting.
It is not a requirement of the GPL that source code be live, only obtainable.
This
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