[CentOS] FYI: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Release Candidate Available to Partners
Jerry Franz
jfranz at freerun.com
Tue Oct 19 13:09:42 UTC 2010
On 10/19/2010 05:37 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>
>> Only on v3 license code. Most code is still under v2.
> and what license is the distro shipped as ?
>
That is a very good question. The *support and subscriptions* are under
RH's own license. The *code* in the packages are under the licenses of
the people who wrote it (generally not RH) and range over Apache, Perl,
BSD, GPL, and a few other licenses. If RH wants to *only* publish the
GPL (and similarly licensed) code, they could do that. But they would
have to go package-by-package and separate them out. The kernel itself
is GPL v2, btw.
>>> Also, there are legalise around exactly what is considered a product /
>>> code snippet / build script and distribution - which is what makes
>>> things like NDA's workable.
>> Actually, the GPL forbids using 'add on' agreements like NDAs that
> And how does the GPL get involved in relationships and partnerships that
> exist between people ?
>
That is what it does. It *licenses* distribution between people. You
can't say "it's under GPL - but you can't redistribute it because I've
made you sign an NDA". It violates the license that *you* accepted to
use it yourself in the first place. RH can only use code written by
other people *if they accept the license it is published under*.
Otherwise *RH* itself does not have the right to use it at all.
--
Benjamin Franz
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