Re: Debian Usage

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Sharath Kottadamane wrote:
> Hi Debian,

Here are users, who cannot necessarily speak for Debian.
The following is my personal opinion.


> We are planning to use Debian as OS for one of our products.
> 1) Do we need to pay license fee for using the Debain in our product?

No. But if you hand out such a product to others, then you need to obey
the license conditions of all included software packages. Debian aims for
having them all free of license fees. Nevertheless, there is no warranty
that no lawyer could pop up and demand money.

See:

  https://www.debian.org/social_contract
Especially paragraph "Free Redistribution".

  https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/legal
Mainly about GPL, but by the "Free Redistribution" goal, the other
software licenses should be ok with this advice, too. If in doubt,
study the licenses of the particular Debian packages which you
plan to distribute.

  https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/
"Software packaged for Debian is normally classified into one of four
 categories. There is free software (main), non-free software (non-free),
 free software which depends on some non-free software (contrib)
 and software which cannot be redistributed (not included)"

  https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq
"If something is free software according to Debian's standards,
 do I still face legal risks when I use, modify or distribute it?"


> 2) We would like to create a custom iso image, which is a stripped down
> version, with limited packages and our custom software application on the
> same. Do you have any documentation to do the same?

  https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/
points to
  https://wiki.debian.org/Simple-CDD
which looks less outdated than
  https://wiki.debian.org/DebianCustomCD
The latter ends by a warning that the usage instructions for the debian-cd
package are outdated since Debian 3.0.X was recent.

  https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed/EditIso
looks up to date, too. It talks of Debian 9.3.0 = current stable.
It also points to a another approach at
  https://wiki.debian.org/ManipulatingISOs#remaster

The ISO production runs shown at the end of both pages are quite the same:

The run of genisoimage makes the ISO ready for booting via BIOS from
CD, DVD, or BD media. The isohybrid run then makes it bootable via
BIOS from USB stick.

The xorriso run combines both. It would also be the one which you
could augment with options from file /.disk/mkisofs out of the original
ISO image.
E.g. before "-isohybrid-mbr":
  -r -J -joliet-long -V "MY_VOLUME_ID"
and after "-boot-info-table" but before "isofiles":
  -eltorito-alt-boot -e boot/grub/efi.img -no-emul-boot -isohybrid-gpt-basdat
which makes the ISO bootable via EFI.
(See man xorrisofs)


Have a nice day :)

Thomas