[Mageia-discuss] commercial support

[Dick Gevers]

On Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:58:03 +0200, Wolfgang Bornath wrote about Re:
[Mageia-discuss] commercial support:

>2010/9/24 herman <herman at aeronetworks.ca>:
>> Yes, but that implies that the Mageia license terms must be sufficiently
>> free that 3rd party commercial support can be done legally, using
>> Mageia.
>
>The software is GPL, everybody can open shop and support any
>distribution which only contains GPL software. The only thing which
>depends on Mageia or any other distributor is if you want to offer
>"certified by Mageia" or similar.
>
>> For example, one can legally do 3rd party installs and support with
>> Debian and Scientific, but not with Redhat, Mandriva, Suse or even
>> CentOS, due to their license and trademark terms (yes I know lots of
>> people do regardless, but they haven't read/understood the license
>> terms!).
>
>Partly wrong. You can always offer commercial support for openSUSE,
>Mandriva Free Edition and such. Only thing you can't is offering
>"certified support". And of course you need an agreement with
>distributors of commercial distributions to support those.

If the need arises, what problem would there be if any number of Mageia
volunteers set up a commercial "Mageia Service SA" with a license from the
Mageia non-profit association to provide such commercial support? They
could make a contract that the profits from the SA would go to the
association and/or the shareholders and/or the employed volunteers at
certain agreed percentages of the earnings.

Ciao,
=Dick Gevers=