The GPL certainly allows subscribers to share these patches freely (and
almost all of them are just backports from upstream anyway), but
I think Red Hat's intent is that this is not permitted while the
subscription agreement is in force. (And subscribers are expected not
to use these patches to support their own kernel backporting efforts,
either.)
Then that is an additional term imposed not present in the linux
licensing agreement and Red Hat _is_ violating the terms.
Additional terms can be verbal, or communicated in some other way other
than a writing.
However:
(and almost all of them are just backports from upstream anyway)
Makes it quite unlikely that a rights-holder would feel harmed by said
copyright violation.
RedHat, however cannot, on the side, impose additional terms. They have
made a business decision, however, to violate the terms and Linus et al
have made a similar decision to not enforce said terms on RedHat since
RedHat does alot of open kernel work (why bite the hand that feeds you
over a legal technicality?).
The situation with GRSecurity is distinguishable in that the violator
has successfully stymied any distribution of it's derivative work via
the imposition of an additional term, and this derivative work is not
reachable by the linux-kernel rightsholders: thus they may feel injured.
On 2017-06-15 17:56, Florian Weimer wrote:
(Note: last month the GRSecurity Team removed the public testing
patch,
they prevent the distribution of the patch by paying customers by a
threat of no further business: they have concocted a transparent
scheme
to make sure the intention of the Linux rights-holders (thousands of
entities) are defeated) (This is unlike RedHat who do distribute their
patches in the form the rights-holders prefer: source code, RedHat
does
not attempt to stymie the redistribution of their derivative works,
GRSecurity does.).
I don't think Red Hat distributes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
kernels to the general public, only to customers who have entered a
subscription agreement. Debranded kernel sources are available from
centos.org, though.
Based on what I have read, the legal construction for the Red Hat
agreement and the grsecurity agreement are somewhat similar. Source
code access is a subscription service (among many others in the case
of Red Hat), and you cannot use a subscription to provide the very
same service you obtain from the provider to third parties.
The situation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is further complicated
because as part of the subscription services, subscribers can access
the Red Hat Code Browser, which provides broken-out and fully
cross-referenced kernel patches, something that is not available as
part of the CentOS offering. The GPL certainly allows subscribers to
share these patches freely (and almost all of them are just backports
from upstream anyway), but I think Red Hat's intent is that this is
not permitted while the subscription agreement is in force. (And
subscribers are expected not to use these patches to support their own
kernel backporting efforts, either.)
_______________________________________________
legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
_______________________________________________
legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
