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When downloading and installing every software package, it is important to know if there is a legal notice the provider wants you to know. And it is possible that the provider is considering some laws or some prohibitions that you should know.

Well, OSes are the most important software packages around and organizations consider the legal notices very important for these packages. For example, when you want to download Fedora from the official site, at the bottom of the page there is a legal notice which contains very important information for the man who is downloading the software! (I've heard that openSUSE does this too, but unfortunately I couldn't find that on the web!). On the other hand, some OSes don't represent these kinds of legal notices; for example Ubuntu doesn't say anything considering legal notices while downloading the image file of the OS. Now the question is:

In my case, Ubuntu, I have reviewed the legal page. Actually I'm new to these legal words and I have a simple question: Is downloading and installing the Operating System itself (without purchasing any support) subject to any rule (e. g. EAR)?

Thanks so much!

mmafshari
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  • Canonical is UK-based. Even if it was in the US, in particular the EAR do not apply, as you can read there "The EAR do not apply, however, to the following: [...] 3. Information and “software” that: Are published, as described in 15 CFR §734.7;" And that pragraph explicitly excludes "Public dissemination ([...]) in any form ([...]), including posting on the Internet on sites available to the public;". It might still be subject to some specific (import, this time) rules in some countries, though, for example because of censorship and limitations of publicly available software. – dadexix86 Jan 07 '20 at 23:13
  • Tnx so much @dadexix86 – mmafshari Jan 08 '20 at 02:52

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