🚀 go-pugleaf

Jacob Heider <lord-jacob@comcast.net> writes:

]On Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:05:21 +1000, Gregory Toomey wrote:

]> They seem to forget that the nerds use Linux at home, college, AS WELL AS
]> in the enterprise. Reh Hat is forcing users to buy support with their
]> latest offering, & breaking the GPL. So the nerds that made Red Hat what

]I what sense are they "breaking the GPL"? The GPL was designed to product
]their right to make money by selling software licensed under it (in
]addition to other things).

The GPL would allow anyuone to buy the Redhat disks and then load them
onto their web server and allow anyone else to download them for free.
To the extent that Redhat does not allow this, they are breaking the
GPL. The idea that you can just put in a little program of your own and
that is sufficient to withdraw the whole distro from GPL is, in my
opinion, legally wrong. In so far as the distribution itself is a work
requiring effort and originality, (and I think Redhat would claim it is,
or they could not exert copyright law at all) then the parts of that
work under GPL require that the work as a whole also have a license at
least as liberal as the GPL. Ie, the distribution, in so far as it
enjoys copyright protection, is a derived work, and thus falls under the
terms of the GPL.

So, redhat can certainly charge all they want for the Enterprize
edition, but they cannot then prevent anyone from giving it away.



]> it is are now leaving in droves (forget fedora).
]> 

]Any particular reason? Redhat + community support, should be at least as
]good as any other community supported linux, since it's starting from the
]redhat codebase.

]> Suse is now part of Novell, which is the kiss of death.
]> 
]> I'm about to order Libranet, which is Debian + desktop/usability
]> enhancements. I'm ordering Gentoo as well.
]> 
]> gtoomey