In message <m0zKYjA-0009TBC@most.weird.com>, Greg A. Woods writes:
>Folks making proprietary software from what was once free software
>rarely leave it all exactly the way they found it.  Just ask the
>hundreds (or is it thousands) of programmers world-wide who've had end
>users of such software ask them for support only to find out that the
>bug was introduced by the proprietary vendor.  Even worse many such
>users will expect *free* support just because they're using what they
>think is a freeware component of the application they're using.

Then you correct them, and tell them about your consulting rates.  If
the vendor is representing that their changed version is your work, you
might well be able to sue them.  Or, use Artistic license to make it *very*
clear that you can sue them.

Anyway, if they think that support for freeware is free, just procmail
'em to /dev/null, you don't need to communicate with people like that.

>Indeed the original copy is still A-OK, but that's not where the
>problems come from.

Well, then the problems aren't *your* problems, and can turn into a side
business consulting.

If I could find people who would ask me for support on variants of my
string library, I'd do it in an instant.  I could happily spend many
hours consulting at my regular rates on interesting new variants on my
string code.  :)

-s