Leslie Satenstein via devel wrote: > What should I do, if the person I gave the software to, removes my > copyright, rebrands the software and sells my software as their own? Is it > right? And when I release a bug fix, they take it, insert the fix into the > rebranded copy they are selling, and they quietly say, "Screw You, > Leslie". Removing the copyright is not allowed under the GPL, and in many jurisdictions your license cannot even allow that to begin with, but that is not what is being done by the rebuilds, so that point is a strawman. The rest is just how Free Software works and should work. > Suppose I was the government, and I did that same offer to end-users. > Would the redistribution be legit, and even honest, if from the > government, and it was for remuneration? Same answer as above. > What right does a company have the right to clone and rebrand my product > and resell it? That is an essential part of Free Software, of Open Source, and of the GPL in particular. > Under the gpl3, they have an unenforceable obligation to > provide me with bug reports. They actually have no such obligation, enforceable or not. > They do not have a moral right to redistribute my software as their own, > and for remuneration. That is your very personal interpretation and does not match the Free Software definition nor the Open Source definition. > In two cases, at least two companies offer Linux as known Red Hat, clones. > We understand that they copy the sources, the bug fixes, and rebrand the > software as their own. In most cases, vanilla in -- vanilla out. But it is > not revenue in, revenue shared. Guess what, Free Software means this is perfectly acceptable behavior, whether you find it fair or not. Life is not fair. > What should Red Hat do to recover the costs for development of new > features, documentation, distribution, bug-fixes, 24/7 support as well, > the infrastructure that allowed an individual to freely download the > entire package. The clones have none of those obligations or costs? Red > Hat is financing Centos and Fedora. Moreover, visit > https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/ > to get a small idea of the investment, operating costs, and end-user > benefits. Recall, Red Hat shareholders are not a government body. The clones also have infrastructure costs. They indeed do not share the development costs, but there is no requirement that they do. > Perhaps it is time to provide a gpl4 rule that encompasses or replaces > gpl3. A "GPL4" with the kind of rules you imply would no longer be Free Software, hence I hope the FSF will never put this kind of terms into any version of the GPL. Kevin Kofler _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
