On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 10:50:02AM -0800, Thomas Lord wrote: > I think you are wrong about clients being able to give up their > rights so casually (see, e.g., GPL FAQ on the topic of trade > secret restrictions) but that is secondary: the provider has > no right to pass along a GPLed work under any terms other than > the GPL, which permits copying and installing.
Well, I suppose it might be possible to violate the GPL in that way, but I'm going to assume that this isn't *exactly* what Redhat are doing - from my brief analysis, it doesn't appear to be. I believe that what they are doing is providing you with a copy of the software under the full terms of the GPL, and you can do whatever you want with that. At the same time, they are offering you the option of entering into a support contract which then restricts some of those rights. The distinction between this and the 'trade secret' case is that you have the option of taking the software but refusing the support contract. Now, Redhat *do* limit access to most of their servers to the people who accepted the support contract... but they still offer the software in a 'reasonable' form to those who don't take the contract. The two offerings are effectively independent, which is legally significant - Redhat are not considered to be imposing restrictions because the client must accept those restrictions of their own volition. So their clients are giving up some of their GPL rights in exchange for an unrelated contract. The GPL does not (and, if my limited understanding of contract law is correct, *can* not) prevent them from doing this. Now, you could make an argument in court that the support contract is not actually optional - in effect, that the software is of no use without it - and approach a GPL violation that way. I think you could even build a plausible legal argument to support this idea. But personally I wouldn't be betting on you winning it. I think it would be a long shot. > Of course, selling support separate from distributions doesn't magically > grant the support provider the right to restrict my use of GPLed > software. They are free to support *covered uses* while refusing to > support *uncovered uses* but not free to prohibit uncovered uses which > are otherwise permitted by law. If they were prohibiting them then you would have a case for unfair contract terms, and would stand a good chance of getting that clause struck down. But actually Redhat are just varying the fee for their service based on some other factors about what you've been doing. This is legal primarily because the insurance companies want it to be legal. Even if you don't want it, they have the money. And their argument makes a kind of sense. Somebody who installs 500 copies of Redhat is probably going to be a heavier support burden than somebody who only installs one copy, even if they both only have one *supported* system. So the courts allow this sort of thing. _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
