On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 14:10 -0800, Syv Ritch wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:14:10 -0600, David Thompson wrote:
>
> > The community doesn't owe Red Hat anything. They are only
> > doing what they are required to do by the GPL.
>
> Actually, not! SuSE operates under the same GPL. Their source is
> available, but you do not have the right to modify it or redistribute
> it. That's the difference between RH and SuSE.
Umm the only thing I believe that had that restriction was YAST ...
under the GPL it's not possible to put restrictions on redistributing
the source. Some interpretations of the GPL would require that RedHat
give out the source code for any package they have distributed to
anybody that wants it for a period of time.
One thing to remember is not all of RHEL is GPL, some of it is BSD,
Apache, Artistic and other licenses that have other terms on
redistribution of modifications. So RedHat is being "nice" by following
the stricter license of the GPL for everything.
I'm still waiting to find out how "community" minded RedHat is with
opening up Netscape Directory Server that they purchased from AOL ... if
they open up the majority of it like SUN did with OpenOffice.org then
I'll be happier with then. If they keep it closed I'll have to put them
in the less community friendly column.
Paul
