On 06/20/2014 03:55 AM, Dag Wieers wrote:
It may have become a legal question now that the SRPMs are no longer available from ftp.redhat.com. That in itself is an unwelcome change.
GPL does not require sources to be released to the public; the requirement is to release sources to the same people to whom you distributed the binaries (and of the same version). The GPL FAQ covers this pretty well. I'm well aware of both sides to this issue, and I sympathize both with the enterprise linux distributors wanting to stay in business in a competitive climate as well as the larger community wanting to have open rebuilds of those enterprise distributions.
It is an unfortunate change, yes, but I prefer to give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt as far as motivations go, since they could close it up completely like SuSE has with SLES and SLED (OpenSuSE is SuSE's Fedora, so it doesn't count). And SuSE is completely within its rights under GPL to do how they are doing; this is not a jab against SuSE, since SuSE has also done and is doing a lot of great work for open source. (Of course, since I haven't looked for publicly posted source for SLES in a while, they may have posted it since I last looked and I just don't know about it.)
