On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 13:18, Christofer C. Bell wrote: > That is *not* the spirit of Free software. That *not* > "the whole idea." The whole idea of the GPL is that if you receive something you must be allowed to redistribute it without any additional restrictions and any modifications must also be covered by the GPL. And if you do redistribute you must make the source available. RedHat does not have any choice about doing this with software that is already covered by the GPL. They would not have to apply the GPL to their own work if it is not a modification of an existing work, but they have chosen to do so, explicitly giving others permission to redistribute. They also would not be required to provide their source modifications to the programs that are under other licenses like X, apache, and perl but they do that as well. In some ways it is a business advantage to have a large body of users/administrators that have learned to use the RedHat-style setup and thus likely to purchase a supported version when the need arises. The alternative would simply be to use some different distribution like Debian or Ubuntu that would require unlearning all the RH-specific concepts. Don't forget that while RedHat is largely responsible for the popularity of Linux and has contributed much to the development of many packages, nearly all of those packages originated elsewhere and are available in many other distributions. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
