I have recently started selling Puppy on ebay, and have been checking out the competition. A search for puppy linux yielded quite a few, and I checked them out. I checked out puppyos.com first and honored Barry's wishes as far as acknowledging him and providing a link to the website. But NONE of the other people selling puppy mentioned either Barry or his site.
WILL YOU PEOPLE AT LEAST GIVE SOME CREDIT? Here is a response I got from an ebay member selling puppy when I asked him to acknowledge Barry:

Response from robertsown2010
robertsown2010( 1)
Positive feedback: 100%
Member since: Dec-13-05
Location: IL, United States
Registered on: ebay

Item: puppy-2.02 seamonkey Linux OS is one of the Best ever (110040208722)
This message was sent while the listing was active.
robertsown2010 is the seller.

Never heard of barry kauler or that particular site but linux is freeware and transferrable. I did not get anything from his site therefore I should not be bound by his regulations no disrepect intended.

Not really sure what your motivation is here.. to send hate mail to some guy who has read the GPL and using it correctly? If someone gets narked about not being given credit then really their feelings and views are potentially at odds to the method they are using to distribute their software. does this Barry guy give direct credit to all the kernel developers, all the X Windows developers etc...? i think not. indeed you may or may not be aware of the history (as i percieve it) behind the recent shift from Xfree86 to xorg-x11. essentially the XFree86 project moved to modify their license to force any application runnign within it to have to explicitly acknowledge the fact that it runs on XFree86 in order to be allowed to use it. now obviously this is a license level mandate not a polite request, but these things just don't work like that. I write software and I accepted long ago that people do have the right to take my code, fork my app and do a better job of it if they see fit. i have no problem with that at a theoretical level, but orignially it felt a little galling when someone said they were going to... a stiff upper lip and i accept that's how linux get's to where it is now, and have to approve of those conflicts for the greater good.

It isn't the code I am talking about. It is the name and logo of the distro which are trademarked. No one is prohibited from using them either, they are just asked to mention who developed the distro and provide the website address. It's a courtesy thing.

So I sounds to me that you are saying, "Hey everybody, this guy is discourteous. Lets all do an email attack on him."!!!
Who ARE you - the courtesy police?

yeah that's about the size of it from what i can tell. why this one guy inparticular? why not all the other myriad of distro makers and software writers who end up on a cdr??? is he really the only one man band making a distribution his bedroom? i think not...

I don't expect someone selling a Puppy Linux CD to acknowledge me (or any of the other Puppy developers) personally.

If someone created a Puppy-overview or review page, then it would be courteous to mention the author/s and provide links to the Puppy websites.

As was pointed out, we use lots of software in puppy and we don't acknowledge all the authors. Usually such info is in the "About" box in the application, just as my name is in the main Help page in the Puppy CD.

Thanks for the response barry, that seems to match up closely to how i see this situation.

I think it just boils down to good manners, acid_kewpie.

Imho it's sad when a mod on a forum doesn't appear to understand that.

But there you go, maybe it's an age thing, or a nationality thing, or a gender thing, or being a non-geek thing.

Disappointing to me that moderator direction, which could have been implemented far better right from your first post, didn't put that post in perspective. I think the opportunity to put the word "freeware" into its true context was also lost. Pity.

The lack of knowledge - sometimes one suspects a deliberate lack of knowledge - about details of "Free Software", the OSS, and all the other vagiaries, seem to be so frequently used by some people to push their own "I'll do as I b****y well please mate" barrow.

While the original poster's choice of words was, perhaps, not quite right, I think he did the right thing in drawing the attitude of the ebay seller to others' notice. What attitude? the one of "never heard of the guy and I'm not interested, I'm going to do as I please".

We should remember that if the ebay seller is in the business of burning CDs for profit (which it appears he is) he should recognise that some CDs - whether he believes they should be able to be lawfully copied and then sold - may in actual fact be illegal to copy except for one's personal use.

I have no intention of getting into a slanging match over the rights and wrongs of piracy, but that fact also has to be considered, and we should ask "Does this ebay vendor sell stuff which he should not?" I would hazard a guess that he sells whatever he can make money out of, regardless of ethics, and regardless of whoever has bust their guts to produce it.

In a way one could possibly compare his outlook with saying "MS Windows? Never heard of Bill Gates", although I would hazard a guess that the difference in ethics between Mr Gates and Mr Kauler would be quite striking, lol

Thankyou Barry for your input. Onya mate for your hard graft

Oh, I'm just another Australian Linux user who enjoys PuppyLinux

Thanks, Barry, for clearing that up. I was not trying to say that any one person should be given credit for a linux distro. My only point was that on your own website, you say that the name and logo are trademarked by you, and others can only reproduce that logo if they acknowledge you and the site. The software is free. The logo is your own intellectual property. That was it. It's kind of the same thing that RedHat is saying. The software might be free, but don't use the name without permission. Also, my note to the seller I mention in the original post was kind. Just a 'will you please...' It was the response I got back that irritated me. And yes, listing his email was a poor choice. Even poorer to leave it here for so long. I shall remove it from the post. A little more on the same topic... Isn't it a part of the GPL that you are supposed to conspicuously place the GPL? I don't see that on ebay much. With these rights, don't we have responsibilities as well?

It's not "freeware" you warez copyright pirating freak!!! It's free software, as in liberated.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

never! first i'd heard of it. That's the quote from the guy that was already selling on eBay, not exactly suprising he didn't know anythign about what he was selling.

sad? don't be facetious, it's nothing of the sort. So many people in LinuxLaLaLand think that in line with the rights and implications of the GPL that everyone should be running around hugging each other and IBM should be sending flowers and chocolates to some guy in his shed who wrote a handy tool they sometimes use. Whilst this particular instance is one small guy to another, and yes i'm sure a thanks might be nice you can't start getting annoyed when this touchy feely logic doesn't come to fruition.

not defending (or attacking) some guy on eBay, you can't say that any lack of acknowledgement is always a nasty thing. do you really think that he's sitting at home cackling maniacally because he didn't write a small line of text on an ebay listing? hardly think so. take the angle of him being ignorant / naive or whatever he's not obliged to do anything in that vein so he's absolutely innocent until proven otherwise, which he won't be, as he's done nothing wrong. if you bump into someone in the street and they don't appologise or anything, do you assume they are a nasty mean person? Maybe you do, but maybe you realise that they have something else on their mind, that they didn't notice, maybe they think they were the innocent party? you've immediately gone attacking someone you don't know with minimal information. and again that guy has done nothing wrong, whether they know it or not.

i'm not saying it's not nice to acknowledge others, of course it's nice, and i'm sure that Barry welcomes but he's personally shown here that he's not bitter and twisted over it, as he sees the bigger picture, the one that actually makes linux make sense in the real world.

and what has this guy even really got the be thankful for... looks like sheer ignorance is on his side and he's not even got a clue what he's burning to his CDR's. then ones who should be grateful are surely the end users who actually get to use Barrys work.

which acknowledgement reads better, the one saying "thanks for the iso, it was 200mb and ended up on a round silver thing" or "thanks for puppy linux, it's a great tool that i couldn't do my job without". i'm sure the latter would mean vastly more to anyone.

to everyone else complaining about this reseller, how many times did you personally state your appreciation of the work Linus or ESR or Stallman or any other developer? you use their software nonstop though... i can't see a huge difference other than this reseller making what.. 40 cents out of the process?

I've had my own software distributed on numerous Linux magazines DVD's... never got a word of thanks, never asked permission, never notified it was on there... why? cos no one has too, and that's fine by mean as i know it's all well intentioned.

Well I did get a reply, and thank-you. I mean it. I'm NOT being facetious - why should I? I'll briefly address just a couple of your points.

You have jumped to the conclusion that I was being facetious. I was not. If you knew me, you would know that was not the case; however you don't, so I won't take umbrage

Even if you don't think it is sad how ignorant and uninformed (not synonyms btw, there is an huge difference), I really do consider it extremely sad the way society in its' inter-personal relationships has deteriorated.

The last time I did so was perhaps 2 weeks ago, when I changed the default topic on irc.undernet.org #linspire to reflect the surprising and pleasing decision by Mr Raymond to join the board which directs the development of Freespire - which for those who may be unaware is the Community development side of Linspire, which is a quasi-commercial Linux distribution.

ESR's reported comments at the time were very interesting, and well worth reading.

That, my friend, is also sad. It shows the deterioration of manners, and how in their ignorance they have in effect stolen a part of you, even if you were prepared to share it anyway.

Not that there is much similarity, but I created, from a magnificent orangey-desktop wallpaper featuring a cat (which I have not yet followed up on, but I shall when I "get a round tuit") and matched it up with the peach theme within PuppyLinux 2.0, and posted a capture of the desktop to the puppylinux forum, with tongue in cheek, calling it "Kitty Linux".

This attracted mirth and merriment from several others, including Barry himself. Now had that been a serious suggestion, obvious a contact with Barry FIRST - or at least the forum, or maybe an email address on their website would have been right.

Look, I've had to interface with these concepts of permission for many years in many different fields. I'm sure that it all derives, in the first instance, from "doing the right thing" and having basic good manners.

I'm not having a go at you. I'm having a go at the very sloppy thinking present in what goes for minds in many people out to make a buck.

It is good to put viewpoints out in a forum. That is the derivation of the word, anyway, from Roman times. The Forum in Rome was where many things were discussed including defence of individuals by "orators". I think it was on the steps of the Forum that Julius Caesar was slain by Brutus (that famous remark "Et tu, Brute" springs to mind).

One hopes that these forums won't have such a terminal effect on its participants lol

Correction, "ignorant and uninformed" have very little difference and actually ARE synonyms.
Section 6.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=ignorant

To me, "ignorant" implies a willful disregard for knowledge, while "uninformed" is just that, uninformed. See the term "ignorance" in the same dictionary you referenced, Sepero. This seller, as far as I can ascertain, is ignorant. Something was brought to his attention and he chose to look the other way. It is worth mentioning that several of the ebay sellers whom I contacted replied with thank you's and stated that they were glad I brought it to their attention.
And more on the GPL....this part taken from the preamble of version 2

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. (italics added by me)