Re: Retailing

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Kieran Lloyd writes:

> Dear Sirs,
> 
>  
> 
> I am considering selling some home made PC's on Ebay, the thing is I
> want to sell these pre-installed with Debian Linux. Would Debian have
> any argument with this? I will obviously be advertising that the Pc's
> have Debian installed however I will not be charging for it I would only
> be charging a mark up on my hardware. Please advise if this would be
> acceptable.

It seems odd to me that no one has yet pointed out the congruences
between this request and that of "Nexenta".  For example, GRUB and
Linux are both licensed under the GPL.  Both would be included with
these retail systems and would be written to locate and call functions
within the BIOS; that is, GRUB and Linux would be dynamically linked
against the (presumably non-free) BIOS.  What distinguishes this case
from the "GNU/Solaris" CDDL-licensed standard library case?  Has it
simply gone unnoticed by those who campaign so hard to kill
competition?

Michael Poole