Dave wonders:
> So, I ordered a set of [vendor name omitted] Linux discs from a
> "Free Linux CD" site.  You know, they make a little on their
> "shiping" charges and claim the CD is free.  I have ordered other
> software this way in the past, and received original CDs without
> any documentation or certificate. The CDs were a little out of
> date, but I did not care.
>
> The "free" Linux CDs, set of three for $5.95, arrived yesterday
> from Hong Kong - on retail CD-R media. Copies, not original from
> manufacturer M.......

Whadda ya want for nothing? :-)

AFAIK, none of the cheap/free Linux distributors are going to give you media
manufacture red by the author of the distribution, and it would not surprise
me if some of them send out CD-Rs (though pressed/screen printed CDs ought
to be cheaper than CD-Rs at some quantity these days).

But if they're cutting them on CD-Rs, I would certainly expect to get the
latest available version.

RedHat allows you to sell your own copies of RedHat Linux, but they have
very specific restrictions as regards the use of their *trademarks*, so you
can't just print up a bunch of copies of the RedHat discs with the same
screen printed graphics that RedHat uses.  You actually have to call your
distribution something like Darnell Linux 1.0 but you can say something like
"based on RedHat Linux 7.2" in small print.  All the details are on RedHat's
web site.

> Linux is free, so there shouldn't be any copyright infringement
> right?

Most Linux distributions include software under a variety of licenses,
though often they all allow free distribution of all of the material on at
least the core operating system disks.  Often when you pay for a commercial
distribution you also get other disks of software which may have a more
restricted license.

With RedHat for example, the 7.2 distribution consists of two CDs comprising
RedHat 7.2, plus two CDs of the source code for the first two CDs.  These
are the fully re-distributable part of what you get in the box.  They also
include a Star Office CD, some Loki games demos, and other stuff which may
be more restricted as far as copying goes.

But generally all you get from the "free Linux" people is just the core CDs
which are often covered by the GPL or other licenses which allow full
redistribution.

The gory details vary from distribution to distribution though.

A good place to look is:

   http://www.linuxiso.org/

where you can generally find out which disks from each distribution are
freely redistributable (because they are downloadable) and you can also find
out the MD5 checksum of the disk image, which can be used to verify that the
contents of the CDs you got are identical to the official distribution (you
might have to make an ISO image from the CD and then run MD5SUM against
that).

G.

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