Bradley M. Kuhn scripsit: > It's certainly possible to license all sorts of copyrights under GPL, > since it's a copyright license. Red Hat has chosen, IMO rather oddly, > to claim strongly a compilation copyright on putting together RHEL and > Red Hat licenses that copyright under terms of GPL.
I don't see where the oddity comes in. If we grant that the compilation which is RHEL required a creative spark in the selection (for the arrangement is mechanical), then it is a fit object of copyright. By licensing that selection of works under the GPL, Red Hat permits another party (call it Teal Hat) to create and publish a derivative work (that is, a collection based on RHEL but containing additional works, or fewer works, or both). But Teal Hat must *not* prevent a third party (call it Chartreuse Hat) from creating yet a third collective work based on Teal Hat's. That seems to me a worthy purpose, and one that the FSF should encourage. RHEL is not as such free software, but it is a free collection-of-software, as opposed to a proprietary collection of free software. > The RHEL customer contract has long been discussed, and it amounts to a > "if you exercise your rights under GPL, your money is no good here" > arrangement. That's not an arrangement that I think is reasonable > (and it's why I wouldn't be a RHEL customer myself), but there's > nothing in GPL (that I'm aware of) that requires that one keep someone > as a customer. Indeed, it seems very reasonable to me that Red Hat doesn't want a direct competitor as a customer. It probably has customers that are competitors in a more indirect sense: IBM comes to mind as a possibility. -- I Hope, Sir, that we are not John Cowan mutually Un-friended by this co...@ccil.org Difference which hath happened http://www.ccil.org/~cowan betwixt us. --Thomas Fuller, Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659) _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss