Is it legal to for commercial software to a free package and not contribute anything significant?

Question

Say there is a npm package which enables me to do functionality A. Say I write a wrapping software which basically just offers functionality A, just packages it more nicely but -apart from that- is nothing more.

Would it be legal to sell this software? Does the original contributor of functionality A (the person who wrote the npm package) get anything?

I feel like some people have done some great work, and I don't understand how it's possible that I can just use their packages and, theoretically, sell them as mine (as it were). Or am I misunderstanding some fundamental things here?

Answer 1

Generally the answer is:

• Yes you are allowed to sell it (most of the time).
• Pretty much any software you buy these days includes free software

More detailed:

• there are really many licenses. Start with https://spdx.org/licenses/ .
• the license of the original package may not allow the selling part. This is very rare
• Sometimes you need to distribute your code (eg GPL3) but you can sell the software.
• Most free licenses try to make sure the work gets reused and sometime add conditions that they or their software gets attributed. They are not so much interested in money

Where to ask these questions:

• https://opensource.stackexchange.com/