> - Open-source also needs some commercial operations to keep healthy. I'll try my best to balance everything. They are out of my expertise and I have to learn. I do have to settle down and support my family, rather than sleeping lonely on a foreign land.
Note that he said he hasn't open sourced them _yet_. It sounds like he just launched the project, and is going to take steps to open source the code/files once he figures out a business plan.
I definitely noticed that irony. I think he'd probably get just as many customers even if he open sources it, just because a lot of people like me don't really have the time or expertise to assemble this.
Sure: I'd like to purchase three versions of it _simultaneously_ to learn how it works: fully assembled, as a kit, and in a source form. That way I guess debugging it would be much easier, and should the two get assembled successfully, they'd make great gifts!
Not only that, but it's marked as GPL but the author says in the FAQ that they want to avoid sharing source or "inheriting" the license. Yet it apparently uses GPL code.
Plenty of projects use GPL'd code but do not release the resulting product. It all depends on how it is put together whether or not that is in compliance with the GPL or not. Hard to say without having access to the resulting binaries.
From reading it several times it does not appear that authors first language is English and it could very well be that either his understanding of the GPL is somewhat lacking or that he is not capable of wording his stance in a clear way. The technical parts are all very lucid but the rest is not. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt until there is a product that can be evaluated.
