Commercial Distribution?

[Udo Schröter (Trionic Technologies)]

> You're creating a "turnkey" system with a known and well-defined layout
which
> includes all of the dependencies to run your proprietary software.  Look
into
> "man release", which discusses how to customize a build and create CD
images.

Yes, I already made a few builds. We're currently (mainly) looking into how
we can make the installer more friendly for corporate helpdesks/IT personnel
and how to customize KDE so users won't complain about this not being
Windows so much ;)

> You should also consider managing your software and it's dependencies as a
> port, even though you might never submit the port of your software.  On
the
> other hand, some people like anti-virus vendors have their commercial
products
> available as a port on a time-limited trial basis (security/vscan, , but
> that's up to you...

Yes, I'm planning to make two packages. One to install all the modifications
and preferences to applications that don't need to be recompiled (this patch
would be applied after install). The other package would contain the actual
proprietary client software. We discussed the trial idea last year - maybe
we will distribute the client and trial users can connect to a public test
serever - we haven't decided yet (however, it is not a consumer product).

> You're welcome to use BSD software in a commercial distribution.  Have
fun.
> If you contribute useful things back, that's nice, but you don't even have
to
> do that much.

Great, we had many idea for little tools and stuff like that (if only a day
had 50+ hours!)

Btw, I looked really carefully and couldn't find any FreeBSD-based
commercial distro (if you don't count OS X). Am I just to stupid to find one
or is this an idea whose time has not come yet?

> IANAL: I'd worry more about falling in the shower and breaking my neck
than I
> would worry about SCO.

Yeah, sometimes I just wish some SCO people would do the
shower-neck-breaking thing. ;)

> Well, you don't have to, but I would really appreciate it if you made
> sure that send-pr was either removed or changed to submit bugs to
> yourselves.  You've probably already thought of this, but I wanted to
> mention it, just in case.

Yes, we thought of that. I just hope we don't overlook anything obvious! But
on the other hand, our customers even call *us* when their Windows breaks,
so you're probably not in danger anyway...

Thanks a lot for the advice, that was really quick!
I'll keep in touch and tell you how the project went, OK?