They stick the licenses in the back of whatever pack of documents are used during the sale. Heck, print it on the back of the work order in small print with a gray font.

On my motorcycle, there’s an option to view the software licenses used on the bike. The GPL is in there somewhere. So are a lot of other things.

And, no, during checkout at the dealer, we didn’t spend any time talking about software licenses.

As a bundler you’re obligated to provide the licenses. You’re not obliged to point them out, highlight them, point folks to links, or archives, or explain how they work or what rights users may have.

They just have to be available.

ok, so someone makes the license available for end user to read or not, thats one down for providers responsibility.

now the next is the nature of linux as a common good, generated by many contributors over some time. is it acceptable for anyone to turn a profit from distributing copies of linux on media, or as a component of a retail unit, for an additional price ?

how does that scale up? suppose thousands of ISOs or live distros are sold, enriching the seller by some thousands of dollars, is that ok?

could i, or you, or anyone, burn a couple hundred disks, or rufus thumbdrives, then sell them for $40 each, and have no concerns ?

the submission, links to what is clearly, a profit oriented business. what limitations exist? none if you just pack a GPL2 in with it? can he charge a fee as if he is selling linux to the end user? is public awareness, and availability a suitable contra for financial profit from sale of a product of many contributions from many individuals over many years?

just how philanthropic is the community?

Yes, it is fine. Thousands of companies include GPL’ed software in their products including Red Hat, a big contributor to FOSS. The GPL explicitly allows it. The FSF has said it’s OK as long as you provide the license and a copy of the source code. It’s not an issue.

You may find it morally objectionable to sell distributions of free software for a fee but for F/OSS licensing in no way forbids that.

GPL version 3 explicitly says "you may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey". The MIT license also explicitly allows selling the work.

No other free or open source license forbids selling either. In fact the Open Source Definition from OSI expressly says: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."

Linux distributions have been commercially sold for decades. Red Hat built its entire RHEL business on that, even when they still played nicer with open source. (Of course the key really was the support they provided to their paying customers but I think you still needed to pay to get your hands on RHEL anyway.)

Of course the problem you'd be facing if you wanted to sell free software at a significant price would be that since you can't forbid redistribution of the copies you sold (and you need to provide source code), someone else can take what you sell and redistribute it for free. So you can only really sell other people's free software if you either get ignorant people to buy it despite the same thing being available for free elsewhere, or if you provide something else on top of it that people are willing to pay for.

That severely limits the possibilities of making big bucks by just selling free software developed by others.

Perhaps the community is philanthropic to the point of providing free software for other people to sell. But the community or the authors of the licenses aren't naive. The possibility has been known from the start, as was the fact that it's after all quite difficult to charge a lot of money for selling something when free downloads are also almost guaranteed to exist.

I'd be a lot more concerned about how volunteers assume active maintenance burden and responsibility for software libraries that are used for free by just about every software company on the planet.

I don't see anything about trinsic2's (or anybody else's) promoting Linux or installing it on customers' computers that would be in contradiction with open source, even morally. I certainly don't see how a "license" could be required for doing so when the individual licenses of each included piece of software already permit commercial distribution. The only way he might need a separate license would be if he installed a distribution that's actually not entirely open source and bundles proprietary components that are not freely distributable.

thank you, that reinforces the idea that selling a "freeware" is how you harvest bad karma from your customers, it makes common sense. you want to provide value and pertinent disclosure to your customers.

theres nothing wrong with a wage for time and effort.

i think contributors could probably handle free coffees extended toward acknowledgement of the effort.

> thank you, that reinforces the idea that selling a "freeware" is how you harvest bad karma from your customers

Well, you should, because doing so generally requires exploitation of the ignorant or an outright scam.

But the additional value provided might be as simple as (pre)installing the OS and making sure it works with the hardware. Or transferring the customer's data from their old OS for them. I see nothing wrong with charging for those. I might not pay for them since I can easily do them myself but they can be valuable services to others.

Hypothetically you could also sell copies of a distro on physical media to somewhere with poor internet access and it would be fine. People did that in the 90's even in rich countries.

Of course it all sort of depends on how much you charge and for what. You probably still couldn't charge $100 just for the copy without some kind of exploitation since informed people would figure out cheaper ways of getting it.

And of course if you just took an existing distro, changed its name and branding to RolphOS without adding anything of value, and then sold ISO images for $100 to the ignorant by presenting it as your unique special OS, you would get a bad name in the community. It probably still wouldn't violate copyright if all the software were open source, you didn't claim copyright for anything you didn't write and you retained the original licenses, but it would be scammy.

Can you say specifically what you this there is to be concerned about, and why you think it is a problem? Just asking questions like this is not an effective warning, I think. We should be direct, to avoid spreading uncertainty and doubt.

>you seem to be up on GPL2 , what happens when someone packages distros on disk or stick, and sells them for profit ? thats something to be aware of as well.

Assuming that someone has customers, they have a viable business model, that's what happens.

That was, in fact, the business model of most Linux distros before we were all terminally online.

Don't be shy. Tell us what you're concerned about and why you think that's an issue.

Are you implying some sort of illegality or breach of license?

Yes, you are allowed to sell devices with Linux on them. I’m shocked that you think otherwise. Android is pushing Linux to billions of devices and doesn’t have to pay anything.