[CentOS] Does Huawei break the license of CentOS?

Wed Feb 21 16:02:33 UTC 2018
Peter Kjellström <cap at nsc.liu.se>

On Wed, 21 Feb 2018 09:31:20 +0800
Genghuang Wang <wangtianjiao.wang959 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

That EULA may be meant to apply to Euler OS specific components or it's
just a, likely incompatible, corporate legal boiler plate. Either way,
it does not overide individual GPL components repective licenses.
 
> According to CentOS Linux EULA
> The Distribution is released as GPLv2. Individual packages in the
> distribution come with their own licences.

Maybe someone from the CentOS project or Redhat can comment further on
this. To me it seems they don't, at a first glance, use any CentOS
specific things but rather rebuilds upstream RHEL in a similar manner
to CentOS. If so then we're back to the license of all the individual
components...

> 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.

I'm well aware of what the GPL is. Clearly any rebuilt/modified
packages/components with GPL license will still be GPL.

rpm query on EulerOS packages (sampled) does not claim Huawei license
but seems to retain original GPL.

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

Well they don't have to. However they have to provide source upon
request. Convenient src.rpm repo is going beyond what is required.

In the end I supose that's all it boils down to. Will they provide
source if poked?

/Peter