[linux-audio-user] License free Linux ??

[Rob]

On Friday 05 December 2003 01:51, lee at fallingforward.net wrote:
> > I dunno, it's a tricky thing.  If the guy were selling
> > Audacity CD's labeled as such on ebay, people would be
> > calling for him to be sued over trademark violations.  The
> Actually no, he 100% entitled to sell CD of Audacity labled as
> such as long as he provides the source code. I think the GPL
> makes that very clear. 

While it's never gone as far as lawsuits being filed, Red Hat 
long ago managed to get the cheap CD makers to not use the Red 
Hat name when referring to even the all-free-software download 
edition of Red Hat (which I suppose is an obsolete situation now 
that it's Fedora.)  Their claims were based on their trademark, 
one of which Audacity has admittedly never filed as far as I 
know.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/10/2014239 - "Red 
Hat: You can distribute Red Hat Linux, just name it something 
else"

> But it doesn't seem like a good 
> business plan to sell a CD of something that can be downloaded
> even on a modem in a reasonable amount of time.

Shareware disk vendors have been doing it for 20 years, though I 
don't think anyone's ever gotten rich off of it.  Never 
underestimate people's desire for immediacy, convenience, 
physicality, or simply their lack of research... especially in 
the Windows world.  I actually think some retail productizing of 
free software would be a good thing, though not the way this 
guy's doing it.

Rob