Piracy in Asia [LWN.net]

Piracy in Asia

Posted Oct 23, 2003 12:10 UTC (Thu) by fergal (subscriber, #602)
Parent article: No More Free Beer?

It is interesting to note that cheap illegal copies of LindowsOS and Xandros have reportedly been spotted on the streets of Thailand and other Asian countries, right next to pirated Microsoft products.

Last year, in the dodgy software shops in China you could get Windows, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake etc all at the same price (about 30 euro cent per cd). The funny thing was that when there was a police raid (with plenty of advance notice of course!) all of the software was hidden away, including Redhat and Mandrake! I had to come back the next day to get my CDs. If my Chinese ever gets good enough, I might try explaining the GPL to them...

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Piracy in Asia

Posted Oct 23, 2003 14:28 UTC (Thu) by kay (subscriber, #1362) [Link]

The GPL say you can redistribute the GPL Software, but not design, trademarks and value added comercial software of the comercial distributions.

So they do "the right thing".

Kay

Piracy in Asia

Posted Oct 24, 2003 9:17 UTC (Fri) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link]

I'm not sure, I don't think Redhat had started to get picky at that stage, people like cheapbytes were still happily distributing RH I think.

Either way, the police were not on a trademark/artwork infringement raid.