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Yes. Here is a short guideline to the licensing in FreeBSD:

1. You may install FreeBSD and the tools on the CD onto your corporate or non-profit organizational computer systems and use it to run your for-profit or your non-profit business.

2. You may install FreeBSD and the tools on the CD onto a PC server that you sell to other individuals or businesses, provided that you distribute a copy of FreeBSD along with it (to protect you against any GNU software that you install). Be aware that you cannot violate BSDi's copyright on the CD-ROM of their BSD distribution (i.e., you can't just burn off a duplicate of the Wind River CD-ROM and hand that out--you must make up your own CD-ROM). It would be prudent to simply add an extra $30 onto the cost of the server on a line item of the FreeBSD software and then provide a new 4-CD set of the Wind River distribution.

3. You may create a commercial product using the software on the BSD CD-ROM and sell that for whatever money you can get, provided that you follow the license of all software on the CD that you use. You should read the licenses that are in the source code of this software for the authoratative definition. As a rule of thumb the entire BSD kernel and OS itself is generally under the University of California BSD copyright which is very unrestrictive. Some other parts of the system, such as the compiler, are under the GNU license which is more restrictive and won't permit this unless you also redistribute the GNU software. You obviously do not need to distribute the compiler in an embedded application.

4. You may organize your own CD-ROM of the FreeBSD distribution from the actual files from the FreeBSD website and sell that. However, the sale price can not exceed a reasonable amount of money for distribution expenses. At the current time this is certainly under $40 for the CD-ROM alone.

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© Copyright 2000-2003 Ted Mittelstaedt. All rights reserved.