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