distrubuting distro

[Nikolas Britton]

Erik Trulsson wrote:

>On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 06:29:08AM -0600, Nikolas Britton wrote:
>  
>
>>faisal gillani wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Is it allowed to distribute Freebsd on any other
>>>distro & charging only media cost related to it ?
>>>GNU based application are very hard to find here in my
>>>country & ordering from Internet is very expensive,
>>>for a normal user , so i was thinking can i copy my
>>>distro Cd's & sell @ media cost in my country ? is it
>>>allowed ?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>You can do ANYTHING you want with FreeBSD (The BSD license effectively 
>>says the same thing as the MIT license, you can see the BSD license 
>>here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php and here 
>>http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html):
>>    
>>
>
>But remember that several parts of FreeBSD are covered by the GNU
>GPL which has somewhat more restrictions (mainly in that (slightly
>simplified) you need to include the sourcecode for anything you
>distribute.)
>
>In either case it is certainly allowed to sell FreeBSD and charge
>whatever you want.  You just can't prevent anybody making further
>copies once they have recieved one.
>  
>
If there was no GPL code in FreeBSD he could prevent anybody from making 
copys of his copys, as long as he keeps the BSD copyright notices in 
there etc he can do anything he wants with it, ANYTHING! For example the 
Windows NT network stack was ripped from OpenBSD et. al. Now if you ask 
me if it's a sane thing to do I'd say no because they can just go around 
him and get it from the FreeBSD site. but the point I'm trying to make 
is that he could if he wanted to, even if it's a stupid idea such as 
this, because FreeBSD IS "free", unlike the GPL.