> Question #1: Is it _ethical_ (legality aside) to take someone else's
I beg to differ. If you want to put things out there for others to use
but want to avoid having the situation as you describe it, simply
license the work as such (which would be neither BSD nor GPL)-
requiring any changes to come back to the original maintainer.
*Snort*. I seem to recall Unix commercial distributions that made
claims that bug fixes that you made belonged to them.
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