[ILUG] SuSE redistribution

[Rory Browne]

> That's like saying selling stolen goods isn't an offence if you arn't the
> first person to sell them.

Only if you consider copyright violation to be theft!!

In all seriousness though that's a bad analogy. Besides the fact that
it doesn't agree with my point of view, When you sell stolen goods,
you generally get paid for them. The Novell license, assuming you are
acting in accordance with it, prohibits the payment of consideration.

Furthermore your analogy suggests that you recieved the goods from
someone who obtained them illegally. This(presumably) isn't the case.
Novell(I assume) have a license to include the aforementioned packages
in their distribution.

People may then choose SuSE Linux, because it is
redistributable(according to Novells Licence), for a particular
purpose(redistribution). Then according the the Sale of Goods and
Supply of Services Act 1980, the product must be redistributable. If
not then Novell are in violation of that act, making Novell the guilty
party. They would also probably be in violation of the Consumer
Information Act 1978. Again the guilty party: Novell.

Now: If Novell were distributing SuSE 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3 illegally they
would have been sued by now.

> I doubt that you are buying this shrink-wrapped, boxed-set software for
> purposes of redistribution -- or that the product literature, looked at
> attentively, will turn out to promise that right.

It might not be the sole reason, but if I choose between SuSE, and
Xandros, because of the redistributability, based on its suitability
for a particular purpose, especially after contacting Novell
explaining the existance of Propriatory Software(which I did), then if
SuSE isn't suitable for redistribution, they are in violation of the
above mentioned acts.

> They never have, which always surprised me a bit.  Even during the days
> when YaST/YaST2 was under somewhat restrictive licensing, it wouldn't
> have taken a lot of effort to bundle the redistributable parts of SUSE
> Professional with substitute software, e.g., anaconda, but nobody
> bothered.  I think the target audience have been mostly perfectly happy
> with the shrink-wrapped offering.

SuSE without yast, wouldn't be  SuSE anymore. Yast is what makes SuSE
what it is. Replacing yast with anaconda, would render you with a
RedHat with SuSE Icons.

> If we didn't like licences, our remedy was NOT to violate them, but rather to 
> use other alternatives (or nothing at all) while working on creating 
> something better.
That would be relevent if we were talking about useing the
aforementioned packages. We're not. We're talking about redistributing
the DVD as a whole, for the purposes of installing the rest of the
software.

Given the situation, it's not.

Rick suggests that the fact that the aforementioned software was a
problem before means that it is probably still a problem. I submit the
oppisite argument. I suggest that when it was a problem before, and
became known as a problem, then SuSE more than likely got the
situation sorted before releasing 9.3. Novell is too big of a company
to put so much at stake, over the right to redistribute the DVD.