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
If a company selling software is of the opinion that a practice is in breach of its licence or that it would not like others to follow, users should respect that. Giving away "free" a version of SuSE linux with commercial offerings is not in the spirit of the terms under which SuSE supplied its Linux distribution. Under such circumstances an agreement should be sought SuSE, which would not act unreasonably.
Just my 0.02p worth.
LW999
What I think about suse reasons of: Give not a 'free' version. Well if you try any 'free' version is not easy of configure if you try any 'free' version do not have usefull 'GPL-less' software But suse has YaST with a very special license, and non-free software, and non-GPL software that makes SuSE in the best Distro knowed for me. If they distribute a 'free-version' without non-..... Software we are goingo to get a non successfull distro. Something like that happend with Linex, a Extremadura Linux, they have in his first distro non-free, non-GPL software, but you cand download it from internet, and in the wish of get a really free distro (Linex was created to be used by the Extremadura Government originally, then if you get the original Prod is wonderfull) they amputated all the non-..... Software and today, well today are a lot of complains of all that claimed We want a Distro without non-free, non-GPL software! Who understandthem?