On Friday 01 April 2005 00:48, Rony Bill wrote:
Dear Jude,
Your tone of writing reminded me of these words that appeared in the Asian Age on 28th March. "It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others"--Joseph Addison.
If you have the capacity to be polite then I would like to get one doubt cleared.
Never ever claimed to be perfect - that is why i read manpages and licenceses before clicking "I agree". And i am most certainly politness challenged. So there.
Can any commercial linux distro be copied and installed in a commercial or corporate organisation? Is that installation considered a valid legal and liscenced copy?
All software (including copies) distributed under the GPL (and several other licences like /QPL/Mozilla/BSD etc afaik) licences are 100% legal and valid. You can use such copies any way you please including charging a zillion dollars for the copy. What you cant do with the gpl is prevent the recepient from 1) making copies and distributing the same. 2) making changes to the software
Also you have to make avaialble at no additional charge except the cost of media the source code for the software INCLUDING ANY CHANGES OR DERIVATIVES YOU MAKE to such gpld code.
So you can buy a "licenced" version of a "commercial" distro like RH and buy a cd franking plant and frank a zillion copies and sell em. The exception is that 1) You will have to remove trade marks like redhat, RH etc. and put your own Gandhi topee if u please. 2) Remove software having EULAS (eg winmodem, NVIDIA drivers) 3) You cannot copy the manuals which have exclusive (as in you are excluded from coying rights) copyrights.
The term "licence" and "commercial" is a red herring planted by the likes of RH, Trolltech and a few others who would like to confuse you into believing that gpl software not traded for cash is not commercial. Grep the list for eariler posts on this issue. Any GNU/Linux distro or gpl softaware is commercial if it is traded for something of value (including barter of cds).
So buy one "commercial" copy and copy and sell to hearts content. When you buy support you will get access to a fast server and / or email / phone support so that you can patch and maintain the stuff better. You can then make copies of the patch ad nauseum and offer the same to your clients.
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
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 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 and the way people attack microsoft for making money. I do admire Bill Gates for the way he set up an international empire right from a small shed. Ultimately every software company wants to make money and capture the market.
I will get the debian cds and try it out.
Regards,
Rony.
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
On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 23:52, sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:
On Friday 01 April 2005 00:48, Rony Bill wrote:
All software (including copies) distributed under the GPL (and several other licences like /QPL/Mozilla/BSD etc afaik) licences are 100% legal and valid. You can use such copies any way you please including charging a zillion dollars for the copy. What you cant do with the gpl is prevent the recepient from
- making copies and distributing the same.
- making changes to the software
Also you have to make avaialble at no additional charge except the cost of media the source code for the software INCLUDING ANY CHANGES OR DERIVATIVES YOU MAKE to such gpld code.
So you can buy a "licenced" version of a "commercial" distro like RH and buy a cd franking plant and frank a zillion copies and sell em. The exception is that
- You will have to remove trade marks like redhat, RH etc. and put
your own Gandhi topee if u please. 2) Remove software having EULAS (eg winmodem, NVIDIA drivers) 3) You cannot copy the manuals which have exclusive (as in you are excluded from coying rights) copyrights.
The term "licence" and "commercial" is a red herring planted by the likes of RH, Trolltech and a few others who would like to confuse you into believing that gpl software not traded for cash is not commercial. Grep the list for eariler posts on this issue. Any GNU/Linux distro or gpl softaware is commercial if it is traded for something of value (including barter of cds).
JT,
While we've discussed this earlier, I'd like your view on the following, from the DansGuardian website:
<snip> For all non-commercial[1] use DansGuardian 2 can be downloaded under the GPL. For all non-commercial use I grant the end-user permission to download DansGuardian 2. Upon your downloading of DansGuardian 2 for non-commercial use I license it under the GPL.
For all commercial[2] use, upon your downloading, DansGuardian 2 is licensed under the GPL, however permission to download DansGuardian from this, or any mirror[3], website is restricted.
The restrictions on the downloading for commercial use are that you may only download it once for free. This will enable you to try out the software before making a decision to purchase a commercial licence to download it. In order to download updates, bug fixes, etc, you must purchase a download licence. </snip>
Based on your interpretation (which I believe to be correct), how does he get away with this? The only thing I can think of is that the changes, bug fixes etc. that he mentions are not GPL'd and will not be posted for free download. Which again is probably not a huge deal even for a non-programmer, since they would generally be rolled into the next release.
Also, if for commercial use DansGuardian gets licenced under the GPL on the first download, I should be able to make and dstribute (sell, give away, whatever) as many copies as I wish. Then where do his stated restrictions on commercial use apply?
So buy one "commercial" copy and copy and sell to hearts content. When you buy support you will get access to a fast server and / or email / phone support so that you can patch and maintain the stuff better. You can then make copies of the patch ad nauseum and offer the same to your clients.
This licence seems funny to me. Is there more to this than is obvious?
Regards,
Krishnan
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Devdas Bhagat -
Rony Bill -
sherlock＠vsnl.com -
Srinivasan Krishnan