>
>> 5. Red Hat's policy change contradicts the GPL's spirit.
>
>
> As you acknowledge, that's a subjective question. I would say "no."
>
> I think the entire history of the free-as-in-speech vs free-as-in-beer
> clarification is proof that we wanted to ensure the right to improve
> software if you didn't like its limitations, not the right to give away
> software if you didn't like its price.
>
> But I also think it's important to acknowledge that the thing that
> rebuilders are asking for (the RPM source repositories) aren't GPL
> licensed, they're MIT licensed, which makes the question something of a
> non-sequitur.
I think you're simplifying too much here and I'm quite sure it's not true
that "RPM source repositories aren't GPL licensed, they're MIT licensed".
RPM source repositories consist of SPEC files, patches, documentation,
helper scripts and more and for sure not all of them are MIT licensed.
Many of those files are actually GPL licensed and as such enjoy the
freedom that the GPL asks for.
We don't have to study every letter of the FLOSS licenses to understand
what Red Hat is doing. Things are much simpler:
Let's assume Red Hat has written 15% of the sources of RHEL themself. That
would mean they've got 85% of the rest of the source code for free from
the worldwide community. Now, large parts of this community expect to also
get access to Red Hats 15% of source code without any restrictions, the
same way Red Hat got access to the 85% of source code from the community.
Everything else is considered unfriendly, shameless and evil, by a large
part of the worldwide open source community.
Regards,
Simon
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