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by mikeash 4395 days ago
What's wrong with charging to expose functionality on a server you own, just because that functionality involves code written by somebody else?

For example, let's say I run Mac OS X server on a computer somewhere and charge for user accounts on it. I'm charging people for the bits of code written by Apple, right? But surely this is completely reasonable of me, and Apple has no place to tell me that I can't charge money for this.

Taking it further, maybe I allow free accounts which only have access to a few shell commands, and then you can pay more to unlock other commands. Again, I see nothing wrong with that, even though I didn't make those other commands.

1 comments

Every program makes use of the OS. You literally couldn't do anything without using the OS.