On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 22:26 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > On Friday 03 June 2005 11:48, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > > I'd put it this way instead: Red Hat is responsible for any
> > > difficulty in creating the CentOS distribution, while sharing
> > > the same upstream developers as all other Linux distributions.
> >
> > I'd put it this way:
> > Red Hat makes CentOS possible at all by providing Source RPMs (which they are
> > not required to do; source doesn't have to be provided in SRPM form to meet
> > the GPL-covered packages license requirements).
>
> This I disagree with ... to quote the GPL:
>
> "For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code
> for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition
> files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of
> the executable."
>
> So, they can't just publish the tar.gz files, they have to publish the
> SRPMS. The spec file and SRPM controls the compilation of the source
> code to make the executable. Now, whether they have to give to
> everyone, or just their customers (and how to define who is their
> customers), is a different story.
Indeed, this is often overlooked by people and makes RMS a visionary in my
book. The GPL is a well thought-out piece (both the technical side as well
as the legal side).
Beware though, that Red Hat does not have to offer this publicly, only to
those who buy the distribution/license. In practice of course, this makes
little difference.
With this in mind I wonder why there's eg. no SLES-recompilation
initiative from someone who buys an official SLES and recompiles the SRPMS
(and distributes both). It will no doubt be much harder (given the overall
quality of SLES packages) but it's possible.
-- dag wieers, dag@xxxxxxxxxx, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]
