On 06/12/2012 03:49 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
On 06/11/2012 08:39 AM, Connie Sieh wrote:
Policy on Scientific Linux(SL) Life Cycle
We plan on following the TUV Life Cycle. Currently that is a total of
10 years. See http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/
We expect to continue releasing Scientific Linux(SL) just
as we have in the past. *
* Provided TUV continues to make the source rpms publicly available
-Connie Sieh
-Pat Riehecky
Am I missing something here? I thought under the GPL as well as various
other open source licenses, TUV was required to make available the full
source from which the full non-encumbered distro could be built
(non-encumbered means excluding any proprietary drivers, etc., that
"taint the kernel"). TUV can split things up in such a way as to make it
very difficult to build the system from source, but not impossible (no
components eliminated, no documentation eliminated , e.g., source
without "readme" files). The only thing that must be eliminated are the
TUV logos and trademarks, but the internal TUV authorship credit on all
of source files must be retained.
If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the
issues, preferably not in legalese?
This is a very common misconception. TUV is *not* mandated to post the
sources publicly for the benefit of non-customers. They *do* have a
mandate to give full sources to anyone who pays for their product. That
is, if you purchase TUV's binary product you have the right to demand a
copy of the source code to any program covered under an open source
license within the distro -- which is everything in the base distro.
Considered another way, no company is under a legal burden to spend
money maintaining public servers to provide all its open source code to
non-customers. TUV has very good reasons for doing so anyway, though,
and they aren't going to stop doing this any time soon.
