[WBEL-users] Redhat Legalese

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 12:52:42PM -0500, Hedemark, Magnus wrote:
> Ewan Mac Mahon [mailto:ecm103@york.ac.uk] said:
> 
> > Oh no they don't - they have to make the source available to 
> > anyone they distribute the binaries to. 
> 
> You're mixing up two of their available options.
> 
Indeed. Just goes to show how silly this sort of discussion can get even
when everyone's doing their best. The GPL is pretty readable so if anyone
has remaining doubts they should probably just read it.
 
> If the goal is to only give the source to people they have given binaries
> to, then they must distribute them together (GPL Section 3a).
> 
Which, of course, they do. In any case, RH would be quite entitled to
release their own stuff under a proprietary license (except where it's a
derivative of someone else's GPLed work), and furthermore to lock up their
versions of anything under a BSD license as well. Those two things would
quite effectively raise the barrier to efforts like Whitebox to such an
extent that we'd all just go running for Debian. 

Anyhow, we're getting way off the original question so I'm going to shut
up now :-)

Ewan