[WBEL-users] redhat seems committed to keep is RHEL SRPMS open

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Ewan Mac Mahon wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 09:29:05AM -0400, Mace.Scott@tatravelcenters.com wrote:
> >> Just came back from Redhat world tour 2004 Singapore.  Spoken to
> >> those guys about WBEL.  They are fine with it since their revenue is
> >> from services and consulting.  The Chief Technical Architect of
> >> Asia-pacific said that RHEL 4 SRPMS will be open as well.  At least
> >> it is a good news to WBEL.
> > 
> > Well, they actually have to.  The GPL requires them to.  Regards,
> 
> Sigh. No it doesn't; for the packages that are covered by the GPL RedHat
> are required to give the source to anyone they give the binaries to.
> They do this by including the full source with every RHEL CD set.
> Nothing requires RH to put the SRPMS on their ftp server for anyone to
> grab. Furthermore nothing requires them to make their own software GPL
> at all, nor to distribute the source for things with BSD like licences
> to anyone, paying customers included. 
> 
> RH could comply with the GPL by distributing source for only the non RH
> GPL components to paying customers and no-one else. Efforts like
> Whitebox aren't made possible by the GPL; they're made possible by
> RedHat being nice.
> 
Redhat's being nice, as well as smart.  RH's allowing projects like WBEL 
to exist is good for their bottom dollar.  Shops like the one where I work 
use WBEL for training and trying out new ideas, then purchase RHEL ES or 
AS to actually run the production boxes.  In fact, I'm giving an 
introductory class on Thursday using WBEL to train sysadmins.  This is in 
prep for our replacing all of our WinNT 4.0 boxes with RHEL ES boxes and 
using Samba as our PDC/BDCs.

(boy, talk about doing research!  Those Samba docs are good, but LONG...)

Ben