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On Mon, 23 Jun 2014, Les Mikesell wrote:
The GPL requires that anyone who receives sources has the right to redistribute them freely, although Red Hat seems to think they can restrict this right if they do it by tying the restriction to the support contract.
I am aware of no such formal statement to specific that effect by Red Hat -- URL please?
About all I know are that there have been lots of speculation and inference by non-lawyers, which rarely ends well or with a result a lawyer might consider 'accurate' [1]
Trademark law is equally full of traps for geeks (and others) thinking that 'the law' is a well-formed logic engine, or state machine. At Michigan Law, I met and had a course with professor [Layman Allen] with 'game': 'WFF and Proof' [2] ... as noted a trainer in formal symbolic logic. Now Emeritus, it seems [3]
I find that 'the law' is not like that at all. It is more like a twisty cow-path, stomped out through lots of individual cases, which make up its life history [4] [5]. There was an interstical stained glass window with that quote at U Mich's Law School, but I cannot lay hands on an on-line photo of it
If you want legal advice, go buy legal advice. If you want Red Hat's view of binaries and Source matter, go buy access to it. You may wish to have your lawyer review the EULA first
M Go Blue
- -- Russ herrold
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I_A_AL, but not your lawyer. I offer legal advice and formal opinion only within the confines of a previously established and explicit attorney-client relationship where privilege may be had; and NEVER on a public list server.
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[1] http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2009/03/promoting-ignorance.html [2] https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/1364-basic-wff-n-proof-a-teaching-guide... [3] http://www.law.umich.edu/FacultyBio/Pages/FacultyBio.aspx?FacID=laymanal [4] http://www.michiganstainedglass.org/month/month.php?month=12&year=2007 [5] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1753389
Abstract: Lawyers from Justice Holmes’s day until today rally around the banner of his most famous quote, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Supposedly, this phrase reminds judges and other lawmakers never to let the law lose touch with the needs of ordinary people. In historical context, however, “the life of the law” says nothing about how judges should decide cases. Rather, it expresses Holmes’s view about how common law judges actually decide cases. More specifically, Holmes’s “experience” refers to judges’ mostly subconscious intuition, while “logic” refers to a vain attempt to systematize intuitively developed law. Proper understanding of Holmes’s famous quote, revealed through this Article’s historical analysis, helps to avoid an unfortunately common analytical distortion, and one which tends to stultify the law - - what Holmes called “the danger of inventing reasons offhand for whatever we find established in the law.”
Pull quote to pay attention to is: “logic” refers to a vain attempt to systematize intuitively developed law