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Re: Pirating Ubuntu?



 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. 
 > 
> Does all that mean that you did in fact infringe on their trademark? 
> Depends if your 'rip' was bit-for-bit faithful recreation. If it wasn't 
> bit-for-bit then it is obviously trademark infringement.  If it was 
> bit-for-bit, then it (probably) wasn't trademark infringement, but you 
> may have violated some other part of the license 

Now that I think about it, I remember that you could download RH8 ISOs for 
free from a variety of mirrors (or from RH themselves; I remember buying 
every other version even though they were free to download just because I 
wanted to support them).  So there almost certainly were no restrictions on 
redistribution of the ISOs.  So if you had a bit-for-bit copy, what you did 
was fine.  (although you could have downloaded the ISOs from their ftp 
server and post them on Usenet just as well) 

RH9 was the last of the "free download" versions, which led to Fedora being 
born to satisfy the "I don't need no enterprise support" crowd. 

RHEL must have some more restrictive licensing (I think it actually has to 
do with redistributing the /binaries/ that RH produces) that keeps CentOS 
(or people like them) from just posting the RHEL ISOs. 

Matt 

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