On 06/16/2018 02:15 PM, Stephen John Smoogen via CentOS wrote:
On 15 June 2018 at 21:07, Keith Keller via CentOS centos@centos.org wrote:
On 2018-06-16, Johnny Hughes via CentOS centos@centos.org wrote:
You agreed to an EULA that says you will not distribute things that you get from that paid subscription. You can do it, and be in violation of the terms of your subscription.
Is this enforceable with the GPLv2? IIRC someone who distributes GPLv2 source code is not permitted to restrict other people's ability to redistribute. It could be an interesting legal test (that I don't think CentOS should test :) )
This gets asked every couple of months for the last 18+ years. This has been the model that pretty much every enterprise company from Cygnus before Red Hat merged with it, to SuSE and Red Hat enforce their contracts. RMS has probably answered it so many times that he has an autoresponder on it.. so I would say ask him and see what he says.
The general way it has been said is that this does not equal what the law sees as an additional restriction on the code. The restriction is on the support contract you have with Red Ha which is not promised in the GPL as being a right you have. The only licenses which do provide that amount and more requirements are code which are covered under the AGPL.
Right .. they aren't saying you can not distribute .. they are saying if you chose to distribute to non customers .. you can't subscribe. That is not the same thing.
Given that they only do that for extended support items only, and that they open source everything they buy from other companies, and allow for 10 years of building for CentOS. It seems to be they are very much more open than most,
I don't see why its a problem to pay them for the very extended support .. since that is very much harder to maintain than even the normal backporting and releasng of security updates that they do (and provide to all, NOT just customers).
That is, of course, a personal opinion.