Actually, it doesn't :-) Like any other software house, they are allowed to choose by themselves what license applies to the software they write on their own. If YAST had been developed by the community, and was GPL, _then_ it would stink as a skunk :-)
Yes, what stinks, is that this is the reason why the CD's cannot be distributed. It is not my company. I just find it a useful service, they work completely legally, so if they are told they cannot copy something then they dont. I am weary of this subject. I think a lot of people cannot yet jump into the quite radical view that Open Source software and all it implies brings to the party. So much of this is still seen in the same terms that Microsoft, and plenty of others, are peddling. I think with the 1500 GPL'ed software packages that Suse pay squat for and then package, it wouldn't break them to relax restrictions on yast. Cliff