From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jul 27 11:18:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom0-109.telepath.com [216.14.0.109]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 56A7C37B9F7 for ; Thu, 27 Jul 2000 11:18:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 1448 invoked by uid 100); 27 Jul 2000 18:17:41 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14720.31940.975964.313440@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 13:17:40 -0500 (CDT) To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: questions-digest V4 #1788 In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > Is it legal to sell FreeBSD for money ($1000?) to customers without > > telling them it's free before they pay? Any rules for this? > Tell your clients you are selling the service (installation, > troubleshooting, ... consulting) for a $1000. The software is free. > I don't think anyone can legally sell something which is free for everyone. > However, you can charge the media (the CD) for $1000 if you like. Actually, you can't legally sell something you don't own. Legal protection for software is copyright law. The sundry owners of FreeBSD allow anyone to make copies of it under specific conditions. Neither of them place dollar limits on the cost of copying, though GNU restricts what can be charged for. You can legally charge whatever you can get away with for a CD with FreeBSD on it or a system installtion - i.e., a *copy* of FreeBSD. You can't sell FreeBSD itself, though. In both cases you need to read and understand all the relevant licenses (the FreeBSD license and the GPL). As for something that really is "free for everyeone" - meaning it's in the public domain (something that doesn't happen very often any more), you can legally put a copyright on that and sell it. You can't legally claim it as your own work, which leaves the potentially embarrassing problem of explaining how you got the copyright. In fact, taking something that is PD (or covered by a BSD-like license) and forming a company to market it is a standard industry practice.