[Mageia-discuss] commercial support

[Maarten Vanraes]

Op vrijdag 24 september 2010 21:24:00 schreef 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.

Personally, i don't think this 'll be a problem if they wanted to be; however:

look at all the other commercial distro's:
- Novell is in trouble
- we don't need to speak about Mandriva
- RedHat barely makes any earnings, even though they are the biggest

a non-profit organisation makes sense to me.

my whole point of this was to have a page with a list of people who had a 
company or are freelancers in their dayjob and are willing to support Mageia 
(non-certified), but are also contributors; so to instill confidence in Mageia 
from a company point of view (small company). i believe debian does this, and 
mentions that this is not related to debian itself at all, or something 
similar.

The sole purpose of that is if you want small companies to use your distro and 
possibly donate if they feel like it. i'm not saying companies use this to 
make money, they could just use it on their computer, or laptop or whatever. 
companies or people who see free stuff, are thinking, but what if there's a 
problem, who can i pay to fix those problems? of course they can ask for free, 
but they know that they don't need to expect something if they ask for free.

if Mageia want's to start a company based on it, that's another thing; but for 
now, let's just focus on the non-profit org.