Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Sun Jul 20 08:41:22 UTC 2008


On Jul 19, 2008, Steve Underwood <steveu at coppice.org> wrote:

> Alan Cox wrote:
>> On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:55:18 -0700 (PDT)
>> Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>>> They(FreeBSD) should be protected, the users can get the ports from
>>> source, they do not ship binaries(except the installation *.tbz
>>> files).      

>> That makes no difference to US patent law.

> Its the same with anyone else's patent law, too. Shipping things as a
> kit of parts never successfully circumvented any patent laws.

But what about shipping only software, rather than computer systems?
Wasn't there a recent court ruling favorable to a software distributor
defendant?  AT&T vs Microsoft, Supreme Court, IIRC.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}




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