On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 07:47:28PM -0700, matthew@psychohorse.com wrote:

On Wednesday 05 June 2002 19:31, Neo Flux wrote:

...

I have a question regarding the licenses of SuSE 8.0 Professional & Personal editions. If I purchased it, am I legally allowed to give a copy to a friend?

Yes and encourage them to enjoy using it too. In fact give a copy to every friend you know.

Apologies for labouring this point - I know the YaST copyright, ISO and licensing issues have been discussed to death on this list, but I think that there may be some issues which have been overlooked. The Pro edition contains a number of commercial packages (e.g. Adabas), which I guess are not GPL. So, are we allowed to copy all 7 CDs from SuSE Pro? (all 3 from SuSE Personal?) I am asking the question because I am currently setting up a SuSE 8.0 machine for a local charity, and I would like to leave them with a copy of my CDs so that I can install/deinstall packages remotely (albeit with them changing the CDs if required). I hope to persuade them to buy their own copy eventually, but I have to get them hooked first, since they don't exactly have money to burn... Anyway, is there any restrictions on copying the whole CD set? Should I avoid copying CDs with packages from the 'pay' series? Or is there a different rule-of-thumb? Or am I worrying about nothing? TIA... PS: I installed 8.0 on my desktop over the weekend. Other than a small hiccup over the 3d drivers (which I eventually found on the SDB after a bit of searching), everything is fine. I was particularly impressed with the ease of setup of my TV card, which I've never managed to get to work properly before. -- David Smith Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com STMicroelectronics Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk Bristol, England

On Thursday 06 June 2002 6:40 pm, you wrote:

* Dave Smith (Dave.Smith@st.com) [020606 02:02]:

...

The Pro edition contains a number of commercial packages (e.g. Adabas), which I guess are not GPL.

So, are we allowed to copy all 7 CDs from SuSE Pro? (all 3 from SuSE Personal?)

No, that's we keep them on a seperate disk. Some of them, like xv, can be redistributed but you'd have to check the licenses for each one.

Is there a definitive statement anywhere on the SuSE site regarding the licencing of the distro? Something describing exactly what is and isn't allowed. If not, shouldn't someone write one? It's unreasonable to expect untrained people to actually read, understand and correctly interpret legal documents. How about telling us, in layman's terms, just what we're allowed to do with it? I've just lent my 8.0 disks to someone to take a copy of. Given that it's Linux, and that it's free, and that I wasn't about to gain financially, I thought I was OK doing this. Seems like I ought to get my disks back a bit smartish... -- 8:06am up 25 days, 17 min, 1 user, load average: 0.12, 0.06, 0.09