[CentOS] FYI: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Release Candidate Available to Partners

Tue Oct 19 12:32:14 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 10/19/10 6:52 AM, Jerry Franz wrote:
>    On 10/19/2010 04:16 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>> hi Guys,
>>
>> On 10/19/2010 12:00 PM, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>>> I'm pretty sure Deyan is referring to their GPL obligations to make the
>>> source code available for most of it.
>> .. this has nothing to do with it...
>>
>
> Yes, it does.
>
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html
>
> "Second, note that the last line makes the offer valid to anyone who
> requests the source. This is because v2 § 3(b) requires that offers be
> “to give any third party” a copy of the Corresponding Source. GPLv3 has
> a similar requirement, stating that an offer must be valid for “anyone
> who possesses the object code”. These requirements indicated in v2 §
> 3(c) and v3 § 6(c) are so that non-commercial redistributors may pass
> these offers along with their distributions. Therefore, the offers must
> be valid not only to your customers, but also to anyone who received a
> copy of the binaries from them. Many distributors overlook this
> requirement and assume that they are only required to fulfill a request
> from their direct customers. "
>
> Once you publish/distribute GPL licensed code to *anyone*, your
> obligation to provide source kicks in for *everyone*. In practice, few
> people hammer at a company "in process" over it. But you *can*.

I'm fairly sure the FSF has never taken the approach of forcing anyone to 
distribute source to anyone who did not have binaries and thus the offer to 
receive source.  In theory you can't restrict the people who receive either 
binaries or source from redistributing them, but with RedHat you lose your 
service subscription if you do, and since non GPL'd parts are included, you'd 
have to separate them (kind of the point of using CentOS...).

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com