On Tuesday 11 October 2005 15:09, Berni Elbourn wrote:
Anders Johansson wrote:
On Tuesday 11 October 2005 13:17, Berni Elbourn wrote:
I have downloaded both flavours of 10.0 I still find that OpenSuse and Suse Linux are copyrighted
As far as I know, everything ever produced is copyrighted, whether it says so or not. Unless it explicitly relinquishes copyright (public domain) it will always be copyrighted. You know that the GPL is a copyright based license, right?
GPL does not limit distribution but positively encourages it. It seems Suse and Open suse are copyright Novell so technically everthing is claimed by Novell.
Did you read what I wrote? *Everything* is copyright. Even GPL software. The fact that something is copyrighted means nothing because absolutely everything in the whole world, unless it has been explicitly put under the public domain is copyrighted by someone. The only thing that matters is the copyright license, and the things written by SUSE that used to be non-distributable has been put under the GPL by Novell, such as YaST. Note that it is still copyright Novell, Inc., but licensed under the GPL. Note that even emacs is copyrighted. Yes, even the FSF flagship. Please take the time to read a few articles by Eblen Moglen about the nature of copyright. Also please take the time to understand that without copyrights, the GPL would be useless, as its legal foundation is copyright law
and distribution limited according the the installation procedure.
Doesn't it say something like "not all software included can be distributed freely"? Things like software not produced under the GPL or by Novell?
No it does not. The Novell license says we can not distribute Suse to our customers.
Do you have the text? I don't have it available right now, so it's difficult to comment, but I haven't heard anything about restricted distribution, other than for the software not actually controlled by Novell, such as Real Player, Acrobat Reader and other third party commercial software