Now there is absolutely nothing that prevents some one who pays for Red Hat 'support' from re-sharing it but Redhat has always gone above and beyond the requirements of the GPL. But their is also nothing in the gpl that requires them to make it easy which they do.
There are plenty of companies I've worked for that license software the write as GPL but don't share it with any one else but their subsidiaries and based on their employment contracts the employees who use the software as part of their job are not technically covered under the shared with clause of the GPL so its highly unlikely you will se any of them on a public web server ever.
The GPL is far more subtle in legal terms than most programmers it users really understand.
That said...
As I've said before can we please stop this speculation train its giving me a migraine and I want to get off lol.
-- Sent from my HP Pre3
On Jan 9, 2014 20:46, zxq9 <[email protected]> wrote:
On Friday 10 January 2014 01:14:02 Ian Murray wrote:
> On 10/01/14 00:16, jdow wrote:
> > Don't forget that GPL means you must have the sources available when
> > asked for.
And this obligation only applies to Red Hat's customers, not to us.
> I have been struggling with this myself tbh. If RH adds a line in a GPL
> program that says "Welcome to Red Hat", releases the binary as RHEL and
> then modifies it for CentOS to read "Welcome to CentOS" and only
> releases the source that says "Welcome to CentOS", then they are in
> technical violation of the GPL, I would say. (IANAL).
No, if you received the CentOS binaries you are only entitled to receive the
sources to those binaries (not the Red Hat ones).
GPL does not mandate that sources get released publicly, only to parties to
whom a program has been directly distributed. Folks who are not Red Hat
customers have not received programs from Red Hat, we've received the same
programs from other places (CentOS, SL, or to be more legally accurate, mirror
locations) and it is those other projects/providers who are obliged to make
programs available in source form.
The fact that the GPL and related licenses also guarantee that any customer
can distribute the source (but not a copy of the binary) to anyone they want
means its almost impossible to can or gag a successful piece of GPL software.
As a business it is better to control that release process than to be
blindsided by it, so Red Hat has fully embraced the open source community idea
and always provided public access to source -- but they are not obligated to
do so.
