Just wondering....
What is Centos policy regarding the use of Centos in a strictly commercial product?
For example: http://www.instantogo.com/
Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
Just wondering....
What is Centos policy regarding the use of Centos in a strictly commercial product?
Nothing *legally* wrong with that per se (provided they comply with licensing/GPL and provide source to their customers, yada yada).
-- Rex
Does the GPL say that the source must be provided to your customers or does it need to be freely available? Does it mean that the customer can take the source, recompile it and freely distribute the software?
Russ Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.
-----Original Message----- From: Rex Dieter rdieter@math.unl.edu Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 17:11:35 To:centos@centos.org Subject: [CentOS] Re: Centos policy?
Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
Just wondering....
What is Centos policy regarding the use of Centos in a strictly commercial product?
Nothing *legally* wrong with that per se (provided they comply with licensing/GPL and provide source to their customers, yada yada).
-- Rex
_______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Rex Dieter wrote:
Russ wrote:
Does the GPL say that the source must be provided to your customers or does it need to be freely available?
Read the GPL. :)
Yes, you probably have about a thousand instances of the COPYING file on your disk...
Oh, ok (spoiler alert)... only to those to which they distribute binaries (ie, customers). That detail is lost on many folks.
You also can't restrict them from redistributing either the binaries or the source after they have received their copies. You must include source for all parts of the 'work as a whole' of anything that contains any GPL'd code. Note that not CentOS programs are under the GPL, and it does not apply to separate application programs you write that are simply included along with the OS (unless they include GPL'd components).
On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 10:30 -0700, Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
Just wondering....
What is Centos policy regarding the use of Centos in a strictly commercial product?
For example: http://www.instantogo.com/
Others in this thread have discussed that so long as a company follows the licensing requirements of the individual packages that people can use CentOS in this way. So, whether we like it or not, CentOS can and will be used this way.
However, I want to say that the CentOS Project is 100% supportive of the use of CentOS in this way. Everyone wins, even if people charge for the product. Making money is not evil ... we all have to pay the rent.
We are also 100% supportive of projects that are totally free (as in beer) and give their sources to everyone. We wish that everyone who used CentOS would do that, but as long as they follow the licensing requirements we are fine with people using CentOS in their projects. In fact, we would much rather projects (commercial or not) use CentOS instead of any other distro. We think CentOS is the best distro out there to base your product on .. and would be happy to work with people to help them do that.
We would expect that groups who use centos as a base for their product, and who make money from that product, would donate monetarily to the CentOS project. We hope to see InstantGo do that as they gain customers.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
Johnny Hughes spake the following on 5/15/2007 2:10 PM:
On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 10:30 -0700, Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
Just wondering....
What is Centos policy regarding the use of Centos in a strictly commercial product?
For example: http://www.instantogo.com/
Others in this thread have discussed that so long as a company follows the licensing requirements of the individual packages that people can use CentOS in this way. So, whether we like it or not, CentOS can and will be used this way.
However, I want to say that the CentOS Project is 100% supportive of the use of CentOS in this way. Everyone wins, even if people charge for the product. Making money is not evil ... we all have to pay the rent.
We are also 100% supportive of projects that are totally free (as in beer) and give their sources to everyone. We wish that everyone who used CentOS would do that, but as long as they follow the licensing requirements we are fine with people using CentOS in their projects. In fact, we would much rather projects (commercial or not) use CentOS instead of any other distro. We think CentOS is the best distro out there to base your product on .. and would be happy to work with people to help them do that.
We would expect that groups who use centos as a base for their product, and who make money from that product, would donate monetarily to the CentOS project. We hope to see InstantGo do that as they gain customers.
That would be nice, but we'll see if the greed wins over the moral obligation.
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Bogdan Nicolescu -
Johnny Hughes -
Les Mikesell -
Rex Dieter -
Russ -
Scott Silva