Is this legal? A good idea, perhaps?
Okay, so I was thinking about, as a business, buying very cheap motherboards/printed circuit boards, pre-installing them with a free Linux distro operating system, and some user software, I guess "OEM" manufacturing it for users, setting up appropriate drivers and databases all to sell it as one "package" for 10-30% more.
I could also offer upgrades, driver listings for hardware compability, etc. Nothing extreme, just basic support, and maybe a money-back guarantee within 60 days or something at most.
For example, I built a small, portable and light weight "mobile device" or "mobile computer" for about $60.00, and sell it for $75.00.
Nothing high-end, maybe 512 MB of RAM, 1GHz clock processor, minimal GPU memory, etc.
I keep doing this, start a website, maybe even work on my own Linux distro for marketing purposes(at least to modify the interface and such).
Can I legally do this, or must I share revenue with Linus Torvalds, get a license from the mobo manufacturer, etc.?
I'd like to know the general topics I should be concerned with here.
I could also offer upgrades, driver listings for hardware compability, etc. Nothing extreme, just basic support, and maybe a money-back guarantee within 60 days or something at most.
For example, I built a small, portable and light weight "mobile device" or "mobile computer" for about $60.00, and sell it for $75.00.
Nothing high-end, maybe 512 MB of RAM, 1GHz clock processor, minimal GPU memory, etc.
I keep doing this, start a website, maybe even work on my own Linux distro for marketing purposes(at least to modify the interface and such).
Can I legally do this, or must I share revenue with Linus Torvalds, get a license from the mobo manufacturer, etc.?
I'd like to know the general topics I should be concerned with here.
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Legally, I can't comment.
However, practically, I can tell you that probably won't work out as well as you've imagined. The idea is good fundamentally, except that, and this is the truth of it, people who want a dedicated linux machine generally have the know how (and desire to) build it on their own.
For a while the company I work for was really big on the idea of building custom computers and doing some really sick case mods. Over the year that followed we found (almost 100% of the time) that anyone who's interested at all in having a custom computer wants to do it themselves. So yeah, we stopped building computers for people.
The only way I can see the business you mentioned be successful is if you're already a huge corporation and can front a large amount of capitol into advertisement - like Google did with the Chromebook.
I don't mean to shoot you down (I would love to be proved wrong here,) I'm just sharing knowledge from personal experience.
However, practically, I can tell you that probably won't work out as well as you've imagined. The idea is good fundamentally, except that, and this is the truth of it, people who want a dedicated linux machine generally have the know how (and desire to) build it on their own.
For a while the company I work for was really big on the idea of building custom computers and doing some really sick case mods. Over the year that followed we found (almost 100% of the time) that anyone who's interested at all in having a custom computer wants to do it themselves. So yeah, we stopped building computers for people.
The only way I can see the business you mentioned be successful is if you're already a huge corporation and can front a large amount of capitol into advertisement - like Google did with the Chromebook.
I don't mean to shoot you down (I would love to be proved wrong here,) I'm just sharing knowledge from personal experience.
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