After Gavin after Dave:

    There is a very straight forward article in plain English(?) that
addresses the definitions of "open source" and copyright concerns that
appears in the October 29, 2001 edition of Network Computing titled "The Law
and Open-Source Software". Enjoy.

                        Eric Sand
                        [log in to unmask]


> 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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