Hi Harmut, Carefully studying YaST license: http://www.suse.de/us/private/support/licenses/yast.html with my lawyer, we came to the following conclusions: This license doesn't contain any limitation to re-distribute SUSE Linux distribution free of charge. It's perfectly legal to install SUSE Linux on any of my clients' computers free of charge as a back bone OS, and then sell them any commercial software which has no reliance on YaST installation and configuration tool. It is the same if you buy commercial Vmware package and install it on your computer as a stand alone application. Would you be able to attach YaST license to Vmware then? Therefore, most of restrictions you've listed in your previous post have no legal merits. Kind regards, Alex On Monday 17 November 2003 09:03 pm, Hartmut Meyer wrote:
Hi,
Am Montag, 17. November 2003 23:04 schrieb Alex Daniloff:
Harmut, Could you please point me to the legal sources of your statements listed below. In the link you've provided there is nothing said that you can't use SuSE distribution as a back end for your commercial software. I don't believe that SUSE is paying to all the developers whose GPL applications you're binding with your distribution. Therefore, how in legal terms you can impose any limitations or restrictions on people who use SUSE distribution for whatever business purposes? Isn't it a contradiction to GPL?
Sorry, I have hardly any time right now. It's about YaST and the YaST license.
Your're right about GPL licensed packages - you could freely distribute them, but if you want to distribute the whole SUSE distribution (or parts of it, but including YaST), you have to also take care of the YaST license.
I don't have a link handy, but I assume if you sarch for "license" on our home page you should find it. If not: it will be on your installed system.
Greetings from Bremen hartmut