Re: Pirating Ubuntu?

["Jarod Wilson" <user=74@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 23:16 -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote: 
> Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote: 
> > When I was in college I purchased box versions of SuSE 7(?) and Red 
> > Hat 8(?) for a friend (so they had official installation support and 
> > nice physical documentation books), and then later ripped and uploaded 
> > them to usenet.  I am still not sure if that was illegal or not, but 
> > at the time, I was told that it was not.  I have never received an 
> > official "yes" or "no".  That case was quite different than this, 
> > because those were not third-party modifications.  They were directly 
> > from the originating vendors (SuSE [it was not Novell yet] and Red 
> > Hat).  I presumed what you were paying for were the physical 
> > distribution, the box, documentation, and included phone support.  So, 
> > was that illegal? 
> 
> I don't know about SUSE, but RedHat has always had a policy of making their 
> improvements open source and pushing them back upstream.  So I'd bet money 
> that you were *not* violating any of the software licenses w.r.t. 
> redistribution (at least w/ RH8; IIRC there may have been an issue with RH9 
> where Redhat purchased an MP3 license, which would have changed the game 
> completely since that license would be non-transferable, but I digress). At 
> the same time, software licensing isn't the only issue, there are also 
> trademark issues.