Ikke's Blog

Can't imagine why not. The code's all DFSG-free, and the DFSG allows you to sell the software.

As it says in dutch on the site, this price includes shipment costs. I guess it's reasonable that way, considering that he has to buy stamps and stuff.

And shouldn't it be legal? The CDs are theirs, even if they got them for free, and the software inside is free software, so they can sell them and charge as much as they want.

It seems to be some kind of paralegal. IMHO, canonical *should* sell the Ubuntu CD's as well - in the end they also have shipping and packaging costs.

Im surprised that someone on p.g.o never seems to have read the GNU GPL. It clearly states that someone may charge money for distributing GPL software.

Ah, sorry, misunderstood your issue :)

I suppose there's nothing wrong with doing it. Canonical won't just ship you a thousand CDs if you ask for them; they'll ring you up and say "why do you want a thousand, eh?", so presumably if your answer was "to sell them on" then they'd either agree with it or not send you the CDs.

The chap might have burned them himself, I suppose?

Having a tickbox on the shipit site saying "no, I'm not going to sell these on" would be stupid. It isn't enforceable even if it were sensible. And if the guy is getting more people interested in Free Software, I don't see how he's any less entitled to make a bit of cash on it than anyone else making a buck passing on apps they didn't write themselves.

- Chris

This is fine! It takes at least a month for a CD to arrive. If people don't know about Free Software (freedom) they'll learn it after installing Ubuntu. If Canonical doesn't want people to sell these CD's they can stop giving them away or become proprietary like Apple.

Note that we probably wouldn't ship you 1000 Ubuntu CDs unless you could provide a very good reason.

Canonical is NOT ALLOWED to enforce any "not for retail" restriction on their free CDs. That would be placing additional restrictions on the recipients of the software. If Canonical did this (which they don't), they would be violating the GPL, which requires them to grant full redistribution rights to anyone who receives the software from them. (Obviously this only applies to those parts of Ubuntu that are distributed under the GPL or LGPL.)

In the edit, you say you're aware that you *do* know one's perfectly allowed to sell Free Software. Since Ubuntu is 100 % Free Software, this means that you are aware that burning Ubuntu ISOs on CD-ROM, and selling these CD-ROMS is perfectly legal. As Matt Brubeck points out, Canonical is not even allowed to enforce any "not for retail" restriction on the Ubuntu software (in the form of ISOs or otherwise).

Why then would it not be legal if someone else (Canonical or anybody else) burned ISOs on CD-ROM, gave them to you (for free or not), and you selled them on? Ubuntu gives the CD-ROMs for free. They do no longer claim ownership of the physical media once the receiver received them. At that point, they cannot prevent one to sell the CD-ROM (since they no longer belong to them), and cannot prevent one to sell the software (since they never could). The conclusion should be obvious.