Somebody asked me recently. Why did we rebrand remastersys as Black Lab Image Creator. We rebranded it because Fragadelic who produced Remastersys asked us to rebrand it. He did not want Remastersys to continue in any way shape or form in terms of branding.
Recently someone has said we are unethical, that by rebranding and redistributing Remastersys that we are committing fraud and some of the more feverish sponsors of the FSF are donating, acquiring the code and then filing complaints with PayPal to get their donations back. Personally, thats defrauding us. But I want to clear up some misconceptions on our supposed illegal distribution of GPL code.
We do not charge you for the software. When you make your $50.00 USD donation you are helping to support this project. Because it is a project. When you donate one time, you continue to get updates from us for the life of the project. We do not "charge" per release. The GNU GPL does not say that I have to give you the software free of charge. It says I must provide the source code to those I distribute the software to. We do that. All the way. There have been many distributions who have taken it inhouse and rebrand it, and create facilities to roll their own distributions and thats fine. Its your source code to do that with. Richard Stallman himself, used to sell copies of Emacs for 150.00 USD on Floppy when he first got started.
We enhance, maintain and keep Black Lab Imager up to date with current Ubuntu releases. We have always done that and we have never misrepresented our work or our "ethics" to anyone. For those of you more feverish FSF supporters who dont like the fact we ask for a $50.00 USD donation for GPL code. You are more than welcome to go back to Fragadelic and ask him for the original Remastersys source code. He charges $50.00 USD for it and its untested and unmaintained on newer releases of Ubuntu.
We provide this software on our honor. There are no activation schemes, there is nothing "protective" in nature to force you guys to "purchase" this software. You are making a contribution on your honor to help us maintain and enhance this software. Like many free software projects we require donations and contributions to keep working on it. If this becomes unmaintainable we will be forced to discontinue it and then everyone is stuck without the facilities to roll your own distribution.
