No More Free Beer? [LWN.net]

No More Free Beer?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 21:02 UTC (Fri) by garloff (subscriber, #319)
Parent article: No More Free Beer?

Apropos SuSE's YaST license: It is not true that the YaST license prevents users from copying ISOs. From the YaST license, it's perfectly legal to do that.
However, you may not sell the result for money or include it in a product you sell for money without prior permission from SuSE.
The YaST license is not meant to prevent private copying; it is designed to prevent other companies that do not invest effort into improving Linux from taking the SuSE work and getting the profit.
This is against the spirit of FSF's GNU GPL, which allows whoever wants to make a profit to do so. That's why the YaST license is often bashed by the GPL fans.

However, I fail to understand why it's so often misunderstood.

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No More Free Beer?

Posted Oct 30, 2003 18:30 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Gosh. It's all about freedom. Not abstract but very real freedom.

The main thing is simple promise: "when you are dissatisfied with service you can fork the project". GPL, BSD and other licenses have such promise.

GPL has one additional promise: "when we have two different forks made by any party we can be assured in legality of merge". BSD does not have such promise and it caused real problems in the past (of course GPL guarantee makes some pother problems for some companies - think TSG).

With YaST you can not "go you own way" when you want to - think about Microsoft's MS IE. Yes, it permits redistribution. But not in commercial way. And this really means you still are tied to SuSE forever. I do not like it. Remember gcc/egcs debacle ? SuSE made it very clear thay do not like such scenario. And that's enough for me.

Oh, I'm sure that's now what SuSE had in mind when license was witten. But... do you remember good, friendly company named "Caldera" who donated Alan Cox SMP system to add SMP support in Linux? Do you? I have a news for you: this is the same company who now tries to make Linux proprietary and if not then destroy it. When you are dealing with companies the only thing you can trust is paper with signed contract on it. Opinions of CEO of CTO only matter as conduit to get some words on paper signed - nothing more, nothing less.

I respect SuSE engineers and SuSE's extensions to kernel and other programs sometimes are very good.

But shen we discuss what distro to use SuSE is not even considered. Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, even FreeBSD and other *BSD systems. But not SuSE. You now know why.