Quoting Marius Amado Alves ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Red Hat sells a *closed* configuration. And mainly support (Red Hat > Enterprise etc.) Not the open software (Fedora).
There is, as far as I can tell, nothing the least bit proprietary in the software contents of any of the RHEL 3.0 variants, or the RHAS 2.1 variants before it. (I have not been able to licence-audit all of the packages, but to a first approximation everything in the distribution appears to be under licences permitting public redistribution.) As far as I (a non-lawyer, and thus not offering professional legal advice) can tell, a lawful possessor of RHEL 3.0 may (per USA law and probably others) lawfully duplicate and give away duplicates of his CDs. If, in addition to that, he takes sufficient steps to also avoid infringing Red Hat's trademark rights, he may alternatively sell the software in question. By using trademark rights and a bundled service agreement to offer a branded, supported offering to business only for an annual fee, yet also respecting fully the rights of forking and redistribution in all of the software's licences, Red Hat, Inc. strikes me as having accomplished something remarkable and (in my view) commendable. You seem to have misunderstood its provisions -- but then, many people seem to have done so. > I merely try to discuss these issues here in as much as they relate to > license terms. For example: dual-licensing requires a 'viral' license; I see no reason why a reciprocal licence necessarily _must_ be a component of dual-licensing; rather, the pragmatic licence-compatbility problems requiring dual-licensing just don't seem to arise with combinations solely of non-copylefted codebases. The primary non-copyleft open-source licenses, to the best of my recollection, are as follows: o Old BSD licence (advertising clause) o Apache licence (newer versions of which have patent-termination clauses) o MIT X11 licence, or equivalently o New BSD licence. Those mix well not so much because of the lack of a reciprocal/copyleft provision per se, but more exactly because they lack provisions that limit licence combination. It would be perverse to create a non-reciprocal licence that clashes with the above licences, but could certainly be done easily. Here's an example: Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that this software not be used to create derivative works with codebases under the BSD, Apache, or MIT X11 licences. -- Cheers, "Linux means never having to delete your love mail." Rick Moen -- Don Marti [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
