On 01/04/05 19:56 +0530, Rony Bill wrote:
sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:
In effect the commercial distros companies are providing expertise not just software and they are fully justified in charging what ever they please. And you can have a completely legal parasitic existence by the above methods. In fact you can provide better services and charge more (after RTFM) than them.
So then happy legal copying and installing of RH, Suse, whatever. If you ask me i would tell you to use Debian and avoid the pain trying to remove logos while simultaneously not providing word of mouth advertising and a ready-to-eat client to your competitor.
rgds jtd
Thanks for the information. It does clarify that one cannot simply copy and install a full pack of a paid linux distro without stripping it off its copyrighted material, something that may be usefull for an
A couple of points that you appear to have missed. The GPL concerns itself with source code. Not binaries, not support, nothing else.
Linux distributors take the GPLed source, package it, build it into binaries, and test those. That is a service. RedHat et al charge for that service.
When you "buy" RedHat ES/AS versions, you are paying for their compiling and testing services, not for the software itself. This _support_ purchase is a contract, which states that you may not install the software from those binaries on more than one system. It has no conditions on the sources, other than the license the code shipped with (GPL/MPL/anything else).
RedHat will not stop you from building your own RPMs from source, and installing those, so long as you do not redistribute RedHats trademarked material along with those.
If you do not want to pay RedHat, you can download their source RPMs and then build your own distribution. When you are doing so, you have to remove RedHats trademarks and logos, since you are not RedHat. You can replace those with your own logos if you want.
Also, there is generally no non-copyrighted material in a Linux distribution. All the software is copyright to its author(s).
organisation for full driver support and manual reference. I am not against companies that charge or make money. I try my best to encourage people to buy legal software and did manage to convince a few. I use legal software in my comps even though its very easy to use the pirated ones. What I don't like is the unnecessary hype about linux being free
Linux itself is free to redistribute, as source code. The only thing you can't do is take someone elses work and redistribute it for free without their permission. This includes the effort spent in converting source code to binary form.
and the way people attack microsoft for making money. I do admire Bill
We do not attack Microsoft for making money. We do object to its methods for making money. Abuse of its monopoly status for dominating other markets, preventing large PC vendors from distributing non MS operating systems is what we object to.
Devdas Bhagat