Legality of Fedora in production environment

[alan]

On Fri, 11 May 2007, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:

> The using of software in business and production environment can be a subject 
> for legislative regulation. It can lead to some legal troubles of using of 
> distributions like Fedora.
>
> Recently the appropriate laws in my country (Russia) have been significantly 
> toughened. Now the police can check for illegal software usage by their own 
> initiative (without request from the owner). The tax inspection demands that 
> software should be registered at accounts departments.
>
> During such a checking, the user is obliged now to show all hardcopy license 
> documents (with original signatures and stamps). But there are no any such 
> things for distros like Fedora, which have been just downloaded from 
> Internet, hence the user shows nothing. In this situation the police *must* 
> temporarily confiscate system blocks (up to 2 weeks) for further checking...
> Certainly, after the checking period all hardware comes back, but such 
> troubles are not allowed for normal business.
>
>
> Are there any similar troubles in other countries?
>
> How it can be avoided?

Scribus and a color printer?  With the proper tools you can make something 
that looks "official".

Howe do they know the stamps and discs for the proprietary stuff are 
"real".

Sounds like your local vendor is using the bad law to their advantage.

-- 
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                   - Alan Cox