Asking less than $5 for you work is more than reasonable. I will now purchase XPilot just to help support you and other efforts like yours. That is what makes the iPhone as a gaming platform so special. Every other system requires that you spend $29 to $69 per game and people cry about what is less than sales tax on those games!

You're quite correct that XPilot NG -- and hence XPilot for the iPhone -- is covered by the GPL. The source is in fact freely available online, at our web page (http://7b5labs.com/xpilotiphone), and if you're so inclined you can go pull it down for free and compile it yourself. We're 100% fine with that and in fact will do our best to support you if you have any problems getting it to work that way. Nnote that this goes well beyond the requirements of the GPL, which only states we need to distribute the source to anybody to whom we we distribute the binary, i.e. customers. Remember, GPL is "free as in speech", *not* "free as in beer".

Whether $2.99 is too much to ask for the app through the store (you can think of it as the value of the port and related new features, or as a distribution/convenience fee for making it easily obtainable) is up to you to decide. If you feel it is, then don't buy it; you're completely in the right to do so, and you can *still* download the source for free.

Also, consider this: there are certainly plenty of apps in the app store written from scratch which do not distribute their source, but which cost more and contain less functionality than just the additional features we implemented on top of XPilotNG. The same rules apply to those: if you don't feel they're worth the price, don't buy them. Why should XPilot be considered slimy just because we're GPLed?

Finally, note that development and use of XPilot had effectively stopped years ago. We hope to make enough money on XPilot to make back the various costs involved in development and running servers, but our first goal is to resurrect interest in XPilot itself. We're not stealing from the XPilot community, we're contributing to it.

Needless to say, sure seems slimy to port an open source program and charge $3 for it, even if they were complying with the license. I could understand $.99 for the time and trouble, but $3?