On Sat, 2003-10-18 at 16:30, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote: > At 07:38 10/18/2003, you wrote: > > > Do I have to pay any license ?? > > > >No, GPL explicitly demands the software must be freely redistributable, > >so no license fee applies. > > Bzzzzztt. Thank you for playing. Just to clarify: you are confusing "free" > as in "no cost" (also known as "free as in beer" or "holy crap, I don't > have to pay for this!") with the "free" as in "freedom" or "liberty (again > also known as "free as in speech" or "holy crap, they give you the code to > look at!"). > > "Freely distributable" means "with full liberty or freedom to distribute". > The GPL does not, in any way whatsoever, suggest, demand, or require that > the software have a cost of $0.00. Software licensed under the GPL > definitely CAN have license fees, so the OP's question is valid. No, it can not have license fees since the license is GPL and does not allow additional restrictions like "you must pay $x per copy". The software can be distributed for a fee (to cover packaging and shipping expenses), but if I ask $999 for my terrific repackaged Linux distribution anyone else can copy it further along, effectively bringing my number of sales to 1. (since everybody copies it - legally - further along) > In this case, the answer is correct in that Red Hat Linux (1.0-9) and > Fedora are free both ways: all are licensed under the GPL and, if made > available for download from Red Hat's FTP site or its mirrors, also have a > cost of $0.00. However, for comparison's sake, Red Hat distributes Red Hat > Enterprise Linux (AS, ES, WS) under the GPL but does charge money for > distributing the binary packages and binary updates. (To comply with the > GPL, Red Hat makes the source code for all of RHEL available.) But with RHEL you're not paying for the software license, you're paying for the ability to get updates without upgrading to new packages and the guarantee the distribution will be maintained for a certain time. (I'm sure some RH sales people can sum up the benefits a lot better ;) Klaasjan -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
