Void's Forums

We formed a new computer club at school. I want to form a small Linux "shop" that will contain info about Linux in general and provide CDs of Distros such as RH SUSE Mandrake and Debian.
As far as I know this is a no no because there are software in the 1st three Distros that are not GPLed. For example QT troll. Is my assumption wrong?

I already send emails asking this to all Distros, I just wanted to get some feedback from you guys as well.

It really has nothing to do with the GPL in any case. All distros are made up of much software that is not GPL (XFree86 is not GPL, Sendmail is not GPL, Perl is not GPL, etc, etc). SuSE has some sort of special license with Yast if I remember right and Red Hat has some sort of deal with their branding and trademarks (icons etc). I think with Red Hat it's only a problem if you want to resell their software. You can do it but you have to yank the Red Hat logos and remove the Red Hat name. Now if you give it away I don't believe you have to change anything, I believe you can make copies and give away as many as you want.

Here is the trademark guidelines for Red Hat:

http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/t ... index.html

Now I haven't read the above in quite some time (and I don't have the energy to read it right now) so my assumptions about it may be way off. Better read it yourself and make up your own mind. If you hear back from Red Hat I would be interested to hear what they had to say.

red hat is probably okay to copy, mandrake is almost definitely okay to copy (although you might only be allowed to copy CDs one and two) and SuSE is not okay to copy.

nevertheless, if you do copy any GPL software for anybody, you must also be able to provide them with full source code if they ask for it, so make sure you have one copy of the source CDs of any distros you plan to copy for anybody just in case.