On Wednesday 02 July 2003 04:27 pm, you wrote: > On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Michael McCarthy wrote: > > Hi Guy, > > I disagree the ethical point is that they are intending to profit > > on the intellectual property/creativity of the developers who have > > contributed to the development of "their" distribution. > > Then limit the distribution of this "recognizable" content. > > I am on Guy's side.
It's not a matter of sides :-) as I see it more the right to freedom of expression/information distribution as relates to The GNU liceince and accepted practice. > > As to "profit", I would like to remind you at least some little facts: > > 1. when RedHat has gone IPO they offered shares to many developers for > free. those who took the offer and sold in time made a reasonable bundle. The point is that the intellectual property is covered by the GNU licience I have no objection to profit :-) > 2. there are more committed to free software than some other distros: > a. Are there any _official_ SuSE isos ? Yes if you pay for them and their commercial content. free content source is available from: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/8.2/suse/src > AFAIK you can install only trough ftp (right try this over a > modem), and not all packages are available (commercial, etc.) Commercial packages have their own commercial liciences. > b. What about Mandrake ? > Do I have to sign for the "club" ? No. Although if you accept any distributions right to restrict the free copying of publicly distributed content you may end up having to pay for all distros. > As far as I know RedHat is the only widespread "commercial" distro for > which the isos are available straight from _their own_ web site (not third > party), _no_ strings attached! > Oh, yes they are bound to release the sources of LGPL/GPL but _not_ > required for isos. And they could have easily add some commercial packages, > like SuSE. > > 3. Somebody ;-) forgot that RedHat itself develops (has contributions) > quite a significant amount of _free_ software. At least AFAIK they have/had > big contributions to Cygnus, Gnome, gcc and the kernel itself just to name > few. The Gnome situation is particularly ironic since they've pushed for it > particularly because at the time KDE was not considered sufficiently free > (QT issues). And now they are considered evil ?!? > > The trademark is among the very few things they have and they want to > protect their reputation. > > What if I would do some perfectly legitimate things (not illegal or stuff) > and then sign "Michael McCarthy" ? Would _you_ like it ? That's fine just send the proceeds to my bank account <g> > > Let see: some third party tries to make a (small) buck out of the free isos > and then they complain when they are asked _nicely_ to rename their wares. > > So far I just smell the envy. ;-) What envy? RedHat (TM) have made significant contributions to Linux and deserve to make a $ from their investments. I just object to their attempts to stop others from a return their investment in distributing Linux as allowed by the GNU licience. RedHat (TM) have not asked for any wares to be renamed rather they have asked that all References to their Trademarks be removed from the websites which appears to be rather strange given that the description of the product has been applied by themselves. Regards Michael
