OSS Malaysia piracy crack

Open source ‘pirates’ to be prosecuted, says ministry – only in Malaysia, will they be pirating open source, eh?.

Noticed they picked up FreeBSD 5.0 (FreeBSD license allows pirating it), and RHEL3.0 (not so legal, because of the EULA and trademarks). However, this does not stop the pirates at Low Yat selling Centos for instance (or even Fedora Core). Heck, they could customise RHEL and call it Rat Hat Enterprise Linux, and that’s probably “legal” too (make sure all the logos and trademarks s/Red/Rat/g though).

So no, there’s no pirated OSS damnit. NSH is right in saying that the BSA might say some silly things (more likely add to the silly things). So in response to LcF and CS, these pirates probably didn’t do anything bad if they sold RHEL Sources (thats 100% legal, selling SRPMS – charging for the cost of the CDs or DVD), and yes, stop wasting public money and time, go pursue the BSA-related organisations (of which RH isn’t a part of, and neither is Novell) instead.

In other good news, the Malaysian Communications & Multimedia Commission (MCMC) backs the HITBSecConf2004. They’re even presenting a paper. If you get a chance to go, the HITBSecConf is a really fun place to head to. Lastly, Red Hat are back with their World Tour. Hitting Kuala Lumpur October 4th, and Melbourne October 12th.

A motherboard designed with feng shui principles?

One Comment

  1. […] Some dude in the crowd, with a Microsoft Most Valued Professional tag, asked why there’s a lack of binary RHEL builds. The usual, if we do that, people sell it and imply there’s support for the product. I thought to myself, that’s okay, they’ll just pirate ya’all. […]


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