I would love to hear your opinions about the following: i have a piece of PHP scripting that we have altered, and edited features too. The orginial owner of the scripting has disappeared and the website is offline (actually a parking page). So there is enough reason to believe that the coding is abandoned, am i allowed in that case to sell my version of the script. The original script was GPL, the scripting has been altered in many ways. thanks for thinking along.
If it was under the GPL then you should have rights to modify and redistribute it. However, you must release the source code if you are making the code available to people outside your organization. Furthermore, the original copyright notice must be attached as well (with the original programmer's notice). Any modified version you release must be released under the GPL.
it is decent you are asking, most do not have respect for sites these days, they are offten cloned, sold, or given away. I just had a site cloned myself, but it is in such a way, that you would never be able to tell that it was a clone. now if the script was from aol or something, then I surely would not touch it, but if it was from someone passing in the night, and now has vanished, then i would not worry to much about it. just think of the clones of famous scripts you see on DP...how many lawsuits do you really see out there concerning this?
well actually we didn't clone the script, we took the GPL version altered the code, added extra features and found out that someone else is running with the original script. But the original script is abandoned. THe changes we made could bring in a good amount of money so that was the underlying thought.