Can you sell the work on refurbished/maintained computers with unmodified Fedora Workstation?

Kind-of similar to this recent post, but I’d like to present my casual case.


Lets say I run a general small-town computer repair business. Someone gives me their computer and tells me to wipe it and do whatever. I clean the dust off it, update the BIOS, stress-test the hardware, memtest, and basically make sure the hardware itself is good to go.

I’d plan to install Fedora Workstation to that computer, go through Anaconda/install, power it off, and hand the computer back to the person; they turn it on and go through GNOME setup wizard and do whatever they want.


In the other discussion there was mentions about not being able to modify a Fedora image to sell it. In my case I’d be installing Workstation as-is and not doing anything beyond Anaconda/install.

Is there any legalese involved with that?

  • I’d be charging for the general hardware testing/maintenance, not the choice of OS installed (not charging anything for the Fedora install itself)
  • I’d be using official Fedora Workstation images as-is from the Get Fedora download page
  • I’d test Fedora itself from a personal install from an external USB drive first to make sure it’d work fine for the other person post-install, and include a physical printed paper or email with links to anything needed for special hardware/drivers (NVIDIA, Broadcom, etc) for the other person to do themselves
  • Would Custom Partitioning be involved as a custom change? I’d plan to use Custom Partitioning → Standard Partitioning (no LVM) → different filesystems (XFS/ext4/F2FS; not Btrfs)
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I have in the past been involved with license enforcement issues.
Any opinions posted here will not count in court.

You will need the advice of a lawyer with knowledge of open source license issues to be made aware of any unexpected issues.

That is what we did and it was very interesting to work on license enforcement guided by good legal advice.

Having said all that; I think you would be ok offering a service to install software for a fee. You could be installing Windows, macOS, or Fedora.
You would need the permission of the customer if you accepted any licenses on their behalf.

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