True. There is still one difference between stealing and pirating stuff: when you steal an object the original owner doesn't have it anymore and thus he has lost something physical and has a real quantifiable monetary loss.

But when you pirate something the original owner does not lose anything physical nor does the act incur any monetary loss directly. Even then, the only monetary loss the owner could be perceived to have suffered would be if you would buy that product otherwise if you couldn't pirate it. But if you wouldn't buy it anyway then there has been no monetary loss at all.

It's that latter part that for example MAFIAA always carefully avoids mentioning anywhere, instead claiming that every single pirated copy means a loss of sales.

Note that I am not pro-piracy, I am just pointing out the phallacy of your logics.

Well, the author of these patches has indeed given such permission: he is patching GPL licensed software and thus it all remains derived works. He cannot distribute binaries legally without also allowing access to the sources _for free_ or else he will be breaking copyright laws.

Thus distributing his work further is all perfectly legal. Claiming it's illegal simply because he requests donations simply isn't true: it is GPL-licensed and he must follow the rules laid out.

Now, I still do understand why he is asking for donations and personally ain't planning to distribute his works, but judging someone else who does it is also wrong; it is within their rights to do so.