[ILUG] SuSE redistribution

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Rory Browne (rory.browne at gmail.com):

> The Novell license, assuming you are acting in accordance with it,
> prohibits the payment of consideration.

As to what specific property, by the way?  Quotations of that statement
here have omitted all context, and merely used the legal term of art
capital-s "Software", without bothering to quote the neighbouring
passages that define that phrase.

If the property in question is (e.g.) Novell, Inc. / SUSE Linux AG's
compilation copyright and/or various codebases over which that firm own
copyright, then that would nowhere conflict with no-redistribution
licence terms on any third-party-owned components.

> ...especially after contacting Novell explaining the existance of
> Propriatory Software(which I did), then if SuSE isn't suitable for
> redistribution, they are in violation of the above mentioned acts.

SUSE customer service have a long record of badly misinformed statements
on this matter.  See prior discussions of that matter on this list.

(2nd repeat, BTW:  The obstacle was never "proprietary software" per se.
E.g., the "xv" graphics utility and pine/pico have proprietary licence
terms, but may be redistributed by anyone and used for any purpose --
because the copyright holders specifically granted the public that
right.  The obstance has been proprietary software _lacking_ that rights
grant.)


> > They never have, which always surprised me a bit.  Even during the
> > days when YaST/YaST2 was under somewhat restrictive licensing, it
> > wouldn't have taken a lot of effort to bundle the redistributable
> > parts of SUSE Professional with substitute software, e.g., anaconda,
> > but nobody bothered.  I think the target audience have been mostly
> > perfectly happy with the shrink-wrapped offering.
> 
> SuSE without yast, wouldn't be SuSE anymore. 

And yet, many people don't care about your distinction, and have valued
SUSE as a full-featured RPM-based distribution with actual quality
control -- even people who utterly loathe YaST.

Happily, with the YaST licence change, that is no longer an issue.

> > If we didn't like licences, our remedy was NOT to violate them, but
> > rather to use other alternatives (or nothing at all) while working
> > on creating something better.
> That would be relevent if we were talking about useing the
> aforementioned packages. We're not.

As is quite obvious:  A distinction without a difference:  By the same
token, we never casually ignored the rights of proprietary software
vendors in distributing distributions, either.

You have just wasted our time.  Again.


> Rick suggests that the fact that the aforementioned software was a
> problem before means that it is probably still a problem.

Far beyond that:  The Adobe download licence that you pointed us to --
and then misrepresented -- _also_ suggests that.

Anyhow, do you have a set of 9.3 Professional Edition CDs or the 9.3
Professional Edition DVD?  Niall does, but seems oddly unwilling to
check the acroread package to examine its licence statment.  Is there a
possibility that you're less shy in that department?

(Please note that I'm asking about the boxed-set CD/DVD edition that
I know has contained the problematic four packages in the past, and
still does so.  I'm not asking about other editions that may not, such
as SUSE Linux Professional Live CD/DVD Edition.)


> I submit the oppisite argument.

Without evidence.  Noted.