On 06/13/2012 01:31 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
On 06/11/2012 07:49 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
[snip]
If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the
issues, preferably not in legalese?
There are dozens of threads, and there's the acutal licensing in the
RPM's and SRPM's. Take a good look in /usr/share/doc/[package-name] for
the license agreements, or do "rpm -qi $name | grep -i license" to get
a hint of what license a package has. Then go *read* them, individually,
rather than attempting to apply a personal mental conception of the GPL
on top of the whole distribution. And check out the history of the JDK
licensing: Our favoritre upstream vendor has been instrumental in the
creation and publication of openjdk, whose suource is openly licensed
and does not require the manual or commercial registration with Sun to
use binaries.
The above mentioned licenses, agreements, and restrictive covenants are
written in legalese. Legalese requires explanation by a law
professional, and the actual meaning of the same language can change
depending upon the nation-state or larger entity under which the
language is interpreted, unlike science and engineering concepts and
even terminology -- the same legalese language has different meanings in
different legal systems (nation-states). As I am not such a law
professional in any nation-state, let alone a practitioner of the
situations under which these licenses are interpreted across many
nation-states, the documents have little utility for me, an opinion held
by many colleagues I know in industry, let alone the academy, who
instead defer to legal professionals. I have read the various GPL
versions, and have read a number of the differing interpretations
(including some of those of Stallman). It was based upon these readings
that I was under the mistaken impression that a for-profit vendor using
GPL software sources had to release the sources (not true under some
other "open software" licenses). As for keeping these on a public web
server (as mentioned earlier in this exchange), I expect that release
could mean to release the source on media at a sensible cost. (If the
claim for burning a DVD-ROM of GPL source and putting it into a surface
carrier were, say, $1M US, no rational person could claim this was
sensible cost. A for-profit vendor could perhaps justify a charge of
$100 US plus shipping.)
Markets set prices unless the government enforces others by a monopoly
on violence (consider the history of the Indian woven fabrics industry
and how silly that got). So don't go off about ridiculous prices.
Anyway, nobody can enforce "sensible" legally, especially in the United
States. I can charge you a million dollars for anything I want to -- but
all licenses that conform to the OSD mandate that the price of source
cannot exceed *or* compound on the price of a program binary, so if you
paid for the binary you already paid for source, regardless whether
anyone feels the price was "sensible" or not.
To break all the legalese down for you:
1- TUV does not have to make sources public. Ever. No license requires
this as a term of the type of customer-client relationship TUV engages in.
2- TUV does have to provide sources to its paying customers if they want
it. Customers can decline this if they choose. You are not a paying
customer unless you paid TUV for something.
3- TUV makes most sources public because they benefit from it and they
are a swell bunch of guys.
Further explanation of any point above becomes necessarily complex, so
don't ask unless you want complex answers or to do your own research.
