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Closed betas and the GPLClosed betas and the GPLPosted Sep 19, 2002 4:38 UTC (Thu) by virtex (subscriber, #3019)Parent article: Closed betas and the GPL Of course, if a company wants to release their distro as a closed beta, they can get away with it by restricting certain parts they wrote themselves. Many distros write their own installer and configuration tools, and maybe some other bits and pieces. They can can restrict these pieces while giving away the rest as required under the GPL, Artistic, BSD, and other licenses. Beta testers would be allowed to distribute the majority of the software, but not the whole distro as a single piece. I thought this was how Caldera used to do their betas, but I could be mistaken. In any case, perhaps UnitedLinux should try it this way if they want to have closed betas. But I agree that open betas work well, too, and in fact gain more exposure, resulting in more uncovered bugs.
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