On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:11:50PM -0400, Phil Beder wrote: > 2. May I charge a nominal amount ($5 - $10) to cover my costs of time and > materials for producing the CD ROMs ?
As others said, yes, but the first copy that is bought from you can of course be further copied without fee if the buyer wishes to do so. In fact, this has happened before. The census bureau in the US offered a street map of the US, but IIRC you could only buy (order for money) a copy. However, as the data was produced by the US government, it was in the public domain. So Bruce Perens bought a copy and put it online :) Since then, the census bureau has put their copy online as well. > 3. Someone raise the point that recently, users of "open source"/"Free > Software" have the reputation of being software pirates, and that this sort > of open exchange at public meetings might look bad or be counter productive > to the goals of the FSF, the GNU project, or the GPL. Could you give your > opinion on this This is not true. We don't think it is unethical to redistribute our software for free. However, we accept donations, and several other projects do as well, like the FSF and the FSFe. So, you can support us in two ways: You can copy and redistribute the software as widely as possible, and you can give us money, too :) Please also pass the information from this thread on to other people at such meetings. You might give a short talk about the subject, or have a discussion round. More information about free software is available at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/ Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
