Re: Why non-free? (Was: Re: KDE)
On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Phillip R. Jaenke wrote:
> I was working in dselect; forgot to install Apache for mrtg. ;P My boss,
> who is watching, sees me select something necessary in non-free. Looks at
> me, "is that commercial? What does it cost?"
>
Your boss is right to worry. Lots of the stuff in non-free does not permit
commercial use, or is shareware, or the like. Thus you must individually
evalute each license in non-free, assuming you are interested in complying
with the licenses. If you install those things without evaluating the
licenses you will almost certainly end up violating one or more of them.
The same problem applies to CD distributors; they can just slap main on a
CD, but non-free has to be picked through and each license checked.
That's a big practical reason for the main/non-free distinction, aside
from the politics.
Havoc
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