> Alan Coopersmith wrote: > > James C. McPherson wrote: > >> 2) why don't Sun provide a torrent? > > > > Some of the third-party software in Solaris > requires certain > > agreements be made with those who redistribute. > BitTorrent > could be seen as allowing redistribution by people > who haven't > > agreed to those license terms. If we someday made > a separate > > OpenSolaris distro consisting of just those parts > that are > > open source or allow redistribution under a license > like the > > OpenSolaris binary license, that could be > torrentable, or if > > we finally removed all the affected software from > Solaris. > what if you send it as aes encrypted file (or > openpgp, or whatever) via > torrent and provide the key in the download center. > > the torrent file is utterly useless without the key, > and the key needs > the license sign-off, but is tiny. this mechanism > would still provide > working load balancing beyond whatever sun could ever > provide. > > > patrick georgi
Yes, and people would be inclined to abuse it. The real problem here is not load balancing, bandwidth, etc. The real problem is all the griping people do about having to register to download and not technically being able to pass it around from person to person freely. An encrypted download isn't going to solve that. Not only that, I doubt most people would have the software necessary to decrypt the download. The best way to ensure that people honour the agreements surrounding the distribution is to ensure they go through the download center. Really, the community will have to be the ones to address this issue more than likely. I don't expect SUN too as it provides little benefit for them. Most reasonable individuals accept the fact that SUN has legal agreements that need to be honoured and needs to track entitlements, etc. for marketing, legal, and other purposes. They're giving thousands of dollars of software away esentially and it's a small thing to ask for basic registration. -Shawn This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
