RMS Condemns "UnitedLinux" per-seat License

dep writes "Likening the practice to Windows, Richard M. Stallman has issued a brief statement condemning the per-seat licensing that it appears will be employed in the "UnitedLinux" core distribution. He calls upon developers to refuse to allow their work to be used by such a distribution."

Comments

United Gentoo

[jeffphil]

From the (now /.'d) Linux and Main article: the companies will allow source to be downloaded, but not binaries.

Isn't that what the `emerge united-linux` command will be for?

I guess Gentoo Linux becomes more and more important everyday.

Re:He's right...

[motorsabbath]

Yep - I've never jumped in on an RMS thread before either, but I hafta agree with him here. It's odd that they've banded together to increase market share, and are now flirting with the licensing concept that kept Caldera from getting any market share in the first place.

I hope RedHat and Mandrake and Slack and (insert you distro here) avoid this like the black plague. It's unfortunate, SuSE is a really nice distro. I hope they don't shoot themselves in the foot here.

JB

Selling CDs != per seat licensing

[jdavidb]

What you are missing is that the GPL allows (and encourages) selling free software, but it forbids taking away the rights of the recipient to further modify or redistribute the software. Caldera (UnitedLinux, by this philosophy, shows that they are just Caldera; Caldera has always done this) can't get around the GPL so I presume what they are doing is distributing source to all the GPL'd parts of the system and noting your rights in fine print somewhere while adding a few proprietary parts such that the whole integrated product cannot be redistributed and you have to pay a per-seat license. This means you're really just paying the license for a tiny amount of the product and not the whole OS.