distribution question

[Brian Masinick]

Ken Moffat wrote:

> landy wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 17:19, Ken Moffat wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> I made some debian and slackware packages that I was going to share 
>>> with whoever (on personal web server) but was advised that to do 
>>> that might violate licensing for redistribution. Any opinions? What 
>>> might the legal requirements be?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> why don't you share them and their respective sites?
>>
>>
>> i.e. slackware you can have it www.linuxpackages.net
>>  
>>
>
> Well, I need to know about the licensing. These are xfce4_rc3 packages 
> and debs, for slack9 and libranet2.8, but they were made with 
> checkinstall, and someone expressed the opinion that licensing was a 
> problem. I don't want to violate anyone's rights or whatever.....
>
Ken, someone is getting overly concerned over nothing.  XFCE is licensed 
very liberally, including GPL and BSD licenses.  I checked the 
checkinstall license and it, too, is licensed as GPL software.  The only 
thing you need to be careful about is to credit those who have written 
whatever software and tools that you're using.  Building packages and 
making them available as a free service violates nothing.  I can't even 
see any provision that would prohibit you from selling such things at a 
reasonable price, as long as you make the source code to your work 
freely available and credit the people who created each tool.  So 
suppose that you created the KMoffat distribution.  You could charge for 
it and be within legal rights as long as you license accordingly and 
give credit where credit is due. That's what the condensed version of 
the licenses say.  Check me out on this, but I'm not steering you 
wrong.  Both checkinstall and the entire XFCE code have very liberal 
licenses.


-- 
Brian Masinick
mailto:masinick at yahoo.com