How can people sell homemade copies of Linux over ebay?
 

Is this legal? If so, count me in! Since Linux is open source software, I could probably sell it as long as you give credit to the original authors and contributors. I'd probably sell Linux Redhat X.XX for $5.00 a pop (entire package). I remember buying Linux for $8.00 over ebay a few years ago. It was a homemade CD complete with a sloppy label.

Yes, people can easily download the ISO's and burn them, but perhaps they'd like a service. CD's sent to them. Not only that, but perhaps a service in which I email them every time there's been a product revision. It's just something to think about..

yes, it's completely legal, and actively encouraged by the distribution crators and the GPL itself.

You can't sell Redhat as Redhat though, that's the only one that's made any declartion about that AFAIK, you can still sell it, but you can't write "Redhat" anywhere on the product.

There are many many dedicated sites on this, http://linuxcds.com etc...

Let's further this a bit:

What about purchased versions of the distro(s)? For example, let's say I have a purchased version of SuSE 8, could I legally sell copies of it? How about giving them away, can I legally give away a copy?

Hm.. I guess it'd be somewhere in a license, I'll just have to poke around and find one I guess.

Cool

well the standard isnstallation discs should be the same as downloaded ISO's so you're back to it there. Additional softrware CD's containing StarOffice or whatever will be coevered by a license, so that'd probably be illegal

I'm sure that conversations like this were had around the inception of RedHad, Debian etc... go for it :)

Most distros can be sold. SuSE is an exception since a couple of their tools (YaST and sax) are not GPL. You can, however, give SuSE away.

RedHat you can resell as long as you don't call it RedHat. Most others you can do what you like with.

I can't see you making your fortune this way. When you look at how much time it would take to process an order, burn the CDs and send them out, you won't be getting much money for your time.

Iain.

That's not the attitude! Tim's never gonna win wimbledon if people think like that! :D

:)

Thanks for the info that I snipped ;)

As for the above quote, that's OK :) I don't wanna make money, that's what the distro's have their stores for, I just am wondering mainly for pure curiosity and if I ever did decide to sell a copy, if that would be legit or not.

Thanks for the info though :cool:

Cool

In the UK, you get various distros on the Linux Format coverdisk for free. As the mag costs £6 with DVD who can compete?

DAVE