On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Emmanuel Seyman wrote: >> IMHO stopping to provide SRPMS wouldn't be in RedHat's interests in >> the first place. > >I have trouble seeing why. The software in the distribution is under a number of individual different licenses. Red Hat, like anyone else must comply with those software licenses. A lot of the software makes no requirements that source code *MUST* be available. Examples of software which there is no legal requirement that source code must be provided are: XFree86, BSD licensed code, MIT licensed code, similar other licenses. That said however, there is no benefit to Red Hat whatsoever in not distributing the source code to those software components even though there is no legal requirement to do so. Quite the opposite - Red Hat has nothing to lose, and everything to gain by making the source code available, as this promotes others to use the code, modify it, fix bugs, and contribute back stuff to Red Hat, and more importantly to the open source community at large. Other software in the distribution is under the GPL or LGPL licenses or some other license which explicitly requires that if you distribute binaries to someone, you must also make the source code be made available to them which was used to create those binaries also. The terms of those licenses vary depending on the license, however source code must be made available to whomever the binaries are made availble to, in an acceptable manner which is legally compatible with the terms of the license. IANAL, however from a purely legal standpoint, to my knowledge Red Hat has no obligation to provide any src.rpms for RHEL on the ftp site or website, as Red Hat is only obligated to provide source code to RHEL to those whom are provided the binaries for RHEL. RHEL comes with the source code included, so those people already have it and Red Hat's obligations under any of the licenses of the software are met by including the source code on CDROM with the product. The source code for erratum updates could be provided via RHN to RHEL customers only, or via CDROM as well, and meet any GPL/LGPL or similar requirements of providing the source code. However, even though Red Hat has no legal obligation to provide the RHEL src.rpm packages to the public at large, they are nonetheless there, and hopefully people out there benefit from them wether they are an RHEL customer or if they're anyone else. There is no real benefit in my opinion to Red Hat holding back the source code rpm packages to everything. I'm kindof confused as to why people would think otherwise personally, as not providing source code to people would more likely do more harm than any good. Both in terms of less people being able to access the sources and potentially fix things or use the code to improve other software, learn, advocate Linux/whatever, etc. and also in terms of negative publicity, public beatings, the slashdot effect, etc. I definitely agree with the statement "stopping to provide SRPMS wouldn't be in RedHat's interests in the first place." So.... conspiracy theorists please seek therapy or something... We're on your side. ;o) Source code good. Fire bad! ;o) -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
