It's one thing if both party A and party B are playing with opensource software, as CentOS is with RedHat.
If you do that with proprietary software, where it was expected that all costs are incurred by party A, then party B would be greatly undermining them by making a free version available. It's not like RedHat incurs the full costs for Linux development, after all. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:19:05 To: NT System Admin Issues<[email protected]> Subject: Re: OT NTOP replacement On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Phillip Partipilo <[email protected]> wrote: > I am wondering here, just hypothetically speaking, if > some renegade out there compiled it up and made an > installer and gave it away for free, so you don’t have > to fork out $50 for a precompiled binary, just for the > heck of it, would there be anything legally wrong with > that? Nope. Perfectly legal. Look at CentOS. They take the sources Red Hat releases, rebuild them without Red Hat trademarks, call it "CentOS", and distribute to the world. It's binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for free. And despite the naysayers, this has not resulted in Red Hat going out of business. If anything, it helps them considerably. Which does make one wonder why so many companies insist they "can't risk their intellectual property"... > Morally probably. Not morally wrong, either. If someone didn't want that to happen, they shouldn't have used an Open Source license. (Or accepted others' contributions for free in the same way.) Open Source is not a free ride for anyone -- users or developers -- but the dynamics are very different from the payware software model. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
