[CentOS] Does Huawei break the license of CentOS?

[Genghuang Wang]

Hello, Peter, thanks for your reply

1. Huawei DOES change the distribution EULA, if type in the following command:
vi /usr/share/eula/eula.en_US
you can see it changed to "HUAWEI EulerOS-2.0"
which is a copyright one, let alone original GPL license.

According to CentOS Linux EULA
The Distribution is released as GPLv2. Individual packages in the
distribution come with their own licences.

So the Distribution license is violated in this sense.

2. GPL is a strong copyleft license, which means that any derivative work to be
open-source under the same GPL license, this to be prevent it from switching to
some more permissive license. So release under a copyright license with the
statement linking to "open source license",which is done by Huawei, is not
allowed.

3. Euler OS by Huawei does not have any public source code repository.



On 21 February 2018 at 00:16, Peter Kjellström <cap at nsc.liu.se> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2018 21:02:59 +0800
> Genghuang Wang <wangtianjiao.wang959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello, CentOS team and everyone who cares about CentOS,
>>
>> Huawei release an Euler OS, which is an distribution based on CentOS.
>> http://developer.huawei.com/ict/en/site-euleros/euleros-introduction
>>
>> According to CentOS's statement, CentOS is distributed under the
>> GPLv2 License. http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7.4.1708/os/x86_64/EULA
>>
>> The GPL license requires the modified version to be open-source AND
>> release in the GPL license, as well.
>>
>> However, Huawei break the GPL license by close-source and replace the
>> license with their proprietary one.
>
> I picked up a few packages from it and they all retain their upstream
> License afaict (GPL). In their EULA they also say that a lot is "open
> source licensed".
>
> If they use CentOS branding that would be a problem (although not
> related to GPL).
>
> If they don't provide source upon request for any/all parts that are
> GPL that would be a problem (I have not checked).
>
> Linux distributions don't really have one license, it's a collection of
> packages with various licenses...
>
> /Peter