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[Eliah Kagan <question165532@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Question #165532 on apache in Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apache/+question/165532

Eliah Kagan proposed the following answer:
@Daire DeDanann
"Its a business line with a static IP; however, the company I use currently only allows 1mbit upstream."

1 Mbps means that, even if we ignore TCP header and application protocol
overhead, you can only upload with a combined total speed of 128 KB/s at
any given time. Even if only one person tried to download from you at a
time, they would probably consider that speed to be undesirably slow,
considering that on http://releases.ubuntu.com,
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com, and many Ubuntu mirrors, or with bittorrent,
it's often possible to for an individual downloader to get speeds
upwards of 1 MB/s (which is 8 times that speed, and for each of a number
of simultaneously downloading users).

In summary, you should not mirror Ubuntu, or any operating system, with
that Internet connection.

That slow upstream speed also means that you cannot offer hosting
services to others as actionparsnip has suggested--your customers'
sites, if popular at all, would be almost completely inaccessible and
nonfunctional.

As I said before, you can still contribute to people's ability to obtain
Ubuntu by seeding Ubuntu torrents. In order to maximize the degree to
which you are providing a resource rather than consuming one, it would
be best for you to seed torrents of Ubuntu disk images that you would
yourself obtain anyway (e.g., for installation on your own machines).

@actionparsnip
"You are complete free to charge for your services but you cannot sell Ubuntu as it is not yours to sell."

I doubt Daire DeDanann wants to sell Ubuntu; the question was about how
to offer it for free download on the Internet and become an official
mirror. With that said, however, can you please cite some source to
support your claim that individuals and businesses besides Canonical,
Ltd. are legally prohibited from selling Ubuntu for profit? Such a
restriction does not apply to most free open source software (though
other restrictions may apply, such as a requirement to offer or provide
source code).

I don't mean to be rude, but last time you said this, I asked for a
citation, and you did not provide one
(https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-
meta/+question/164587). Are you sure you are right about this? Please
consider that this claim of yours appears to be directly contradicted by
language in http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/licensing, which
requires that software included in the main and restricted components
"[m]ust allow redistribution" and clarifies the meaning of this as
"[y]our right to sell or give away the software alone, or as part of an
aggregate software distribution...". If all the software from which
Ubuntu is made has to be sellable by anyone, it would be strange if
Ubuntu wouldn't be sellable by anyone. As a related point: Much of the
software in Ubuntu is also not Canonical's (they do not hold copyright
on the majority of the source code for the system), yet they sell copes
of Ubuntu for profit in their store. Why do you think we cannot do the
same?

The only way for Canonial to legally prevent people from selling Ubuntu
for profit, beisdes by including non-free software, would be to include
non-free artwork and/or make the CD's "layout" proprietary like the
OpenBSD project does for their official CDs
(http://openbsd.org/faq/faq3.html#ISO). If Canonical were doing this,
why wouldn't they have mentioned it at http://www.ubuntu.com/project
/about-ubuntu/licensing?

The ability to sell free open source software for profit, even when one
is not the copyright holder and even when one is not a contributor to
the software, is considered to be an essential freedom without which the
software is neither free nor open source. See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html,
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html,
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines (if, on first reading,
you think this says a DFSG-compatible license can prohibit someone from
selling the software for profit, take a second look), and
http://opensource.org/docs/osd. It is sometimes possible for a publisher
to artificially subvert this for a distribution of free open source
software by including proprietary artwork or "layout" or "design" in the
distribution (are you saying Ubuntu is encumbered in this way?), but the
right to sell copies applies generally to free open source software; the
concept of "yours to sell" does not apply.

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