On 03/05/2019 08:19, Tom H wrote: Red hat can limit access to its source RPMs to its paying customers and prevent free rebuilds
Whilst it is true that Red Hat could legitimately limit access to its source code to authorised users of its software, I don't think this could or would prevent free rebuilds from occurring. For example, I have a free of charge dev licence for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (anyone can sign up to one of these at present). Most of this code is licensed under GPL (v2 mostly I think) and, as per that licence, RHEL have to give me access to the source code. Indeed, I can easily download two ISOs full of source RPMs from Red Hat's website. Although Red Hat have an extensive end user licence agreement, it is generally accepted that no terms in such an EULA can extinguish the software licence terms under which copyright holders have chosen to distribute heir software. In this case that is the GPL and both Red Hat and myself are bound by it. One of the terms of the GPL is that licensees (which includes Red Hat, me, and any other legitimate Red Hat customer) may modify the work as well as copy and redistribute the work or any derivative version of it. Furthermore, GPL prevents licensees from imposing any further restrictions of any of the rights that GPL grants. Therefore, in brief, even though Red Hat have their own EULA and even though they could legitimately (under GPL) limit distribution of RHEL source code to their own customers (both paying and non-paying ones like me), they cannot prevent any of those customers from freely re-distributing the source code or modifying it. Thus a free re-distribution could still be created, no matter what. The only limitation that Red Hat could feasibly add would relate to their own trademarked intellectual property that is not part of the source as such, such as trade names, trademark images, etc. I *presume* (but I am not certain and have not checked) that I might need to remove these trademarked properties from the source RPMs before redistributing the source code. This is, of course, exactly what the CentOS project did and still does. As a matter of interest, can anyone confirm whether I'd need to remove Red Hat's trademarked intellectual property from their source RPMs before re-distributing them under GPL or could I re-distribute under GPL them unchanged?
