[Glastonbury] suse license

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 05:39:15AM +0000, Greg Browne wrote:
> Andy - That seems very clear to me. 
> 
> Now just to muddy the water 
> 
> >From linspire.com. "Buy Linspire for as low as $49.95 and get
> StarOffice 7 for FREE! SAVE 40% over buying StarOffice 7 alone!"
> 
StarOffice 7 is a commercial program. The CD you get has binaries for
Linux and Solaris and Windows. I'm not sure what the "number of
licences" you get is: I think once you've bought it you can install it
on any (one??) machine you (personally) own. Sun will sell you support for 
it. Sun will also sell you site licences at a discount. It includes a
database and may include enhanced spelling/dictionary features - I
haven't seen a copy lately to judge.

OpenOffice.org is a GPL'd program (or, I think, more correctly a
dual-licensed program). It contains virtually nothing different to
the SO program and is free to use/copy/distribute/modify. Debian Free
Software Guidelines (DFSG) free.

Linspire have just done a volume licensing deal with Sun. It might have
cost them 60c. a copy rather than $60. They get recognition: Sun gets
publicity for a slow-selling product (since most people use OO.org) and
there's always the chance that someone will buy a full copy of SO to use
on Windows/demo it to friends who buy a copy etc. etc.

The actual cost of a distribution is somebody's time, media and boxes
and marketing, telephone support. Support costs should be factored in 
with development. Most people who "just try" Linux and fail with a
commercial distribution probably never bother to ring a helpline - they
just bin Linux and grouse. SuSE offer a period of
"installation support" - but once you're installed you should be off and 
running.  Red Hat offer NO formal support to Fedora: Red Hat Enterprise
costs big $$ but is released every 18 months and is then maintained for 
up to 7 years.  

Compare and contrast Debian (mailing list support only - hire a paid
Debian-type person if you want major support - but you may never ever
need it) to Red Hat running Oracle (major support staffs, telephone
support lines but support at $1000+ per year per seat). The same Oracle
software will run on both - but Oracle won't "support" Debian. Ditto
Slackware.
> 
> So there is going to be free software, free + and free ++ ?
> 
Yes: you've hit the nail on the head. 

Debian is free software. There are large armies of barrack-room lawyers 
who hang out on debian-legal and assiduously tear licences to shreds. 
Any that aren't sufficiently free according to the DFSG don't get in/stay in. 
Pine, for example, is a mail client from the University of Washington.  
They forbade any modifications to their binaries when they clarified their 
interpretation of their licence. Debian can now only distribute source for 
the user to build. Ditto Dan Bernstein's qmail and so on.  
Adobe distribute a "free" Acrobat reader (acroread). The small print on the 
licence says that you can't use this on a system where there is competing 
software that will write PDF files. Debian dropped distribution.

Nvidia drivers, for example, are free to download and free to use - but 
you can't see source, you can't reverse-engineer and you can't fix the 
binary. If it doesn't work - you're out of luck.  For most people they're
"free enough" if you want acceleration on your 3D performance under the X
Windows system.

Red Hat is (primarily) GPL'd so you can get the source and build it
yourself- but you can't call it Red Hat, must remove all trademarks 
and associated "stuff" and can get no support.  This is why you get Pink Tie 
(Red Hat 9 work-alike) or Whitebox Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux work-alike).

Hope this helps,

Andy