2009/2/8 Tom Wickline twickline@gmail.com:
On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Ben Klein shacklein@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/8 Tom Wickline twickline@gmail.com:
And your getting the OS and support with the OS.
Wrong. Read the license. They offer absolutely no support for the OS. You're buying the binaries and that's it. (This could be a violation of GPL too)
They have a support forum, im sure they would help people with issues.
Their license actually says that they don't provide support. http://www.imagicos.com/get.html 7: GENERAL "Licensor has no obligation to provide support, maintenance, upgrades, modifications or new releases under this Agreement."
Argue the semantics of "obligation" if you will, but their license actually says they're not selling support at all.
No matter what you think, this particular distro looks very shifty to me. Possible license violations (not that I'm an expert, and I'd welcome an expert opinion).
What's shitty about it?
Shifty. With an 'f'. AKA "dodgy", AKA "don't trust them to open a can of beans"
they are a small distro who is bundling CrossOver and Wine and annoucing that they provide support for a select number of Windows applications and games.. Seems to me you would be delighted by this publisity of Wine.
What publicity? The fact that it was brought to the attention of wine-devel? Is anyone ELSE talking about it?
Also, IneedAname CrossOver Pro cost $69.95 up until yesterday, then it went on Valintines Day sale and was ruducet to $59.95 ...
See: http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/cxoffice-linux/codeweavers-valentin...
Part of the problem with iMagic is they don't actually tell you what you get. They make a reference to Wine here, a reference to Crossover there. Someone suggested that they ship Crossover Games. Isn't that cheaper than Pro?
And even if they are in some way vilolating the GPL by not hosting the operating systems source
Not the problem. 1) Source of individual apps can be retrieved from appropriate websites. As long as the websites are referenced in the distro's documentation of each app, they're within the grounds of GPL. 2) They don't have to license their own code written for the distro under GPL
What it seems to me is that they are selling binaries, not support. They could be selling licenses (for Crossover, mp3 etc), but that's not a matter for us to resolve. If it is determined that what they are selling is binaries, then I'm almost certain that is a violation of GPL.
From memory, GPL allows you to charge for the cost of delivering the
software (e.g. CD media, postage), but not the binaries themselves.
that has absoloutly nothing to do with Wine... You guy's need to take that up with gnu.org
I've asked FSF licensing people for their opinion. It could be interesting, but it's likely a complicated case due to poor information provided by iMagic and shipping with multiple commercial licenses.
Tom