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The game that has been spelled out elsewhere is that the subscription can be terminated for this violation of the subscription terms of service (which is not th
by saltcured 3y ago
The game that has been spelled out elsewhere is that the subscription can be terminated for this violation of the subscription terms of service (which is not the same thing as the software license). This termination would prevent you from receiving future versions of binaries or sources.
So, RedHat can satisfy the letter of the law regarding licensing, where source is distributed under GPL to those who received the binaries. With each incremental binary distribution they satisfy the GPL rules and makes source available to the recipient of binaries, but they may cut off a customer as soon as they detect that the customer is actually exercising their full GPL rights. So that customer loses access to future binaries and corresponding sources.
This attitude violates the experience many of us take for granted about free software and the GPL, where we expect a community to be engaging as an equivalence class of members sharing the same rights. But the GPL started with provisions enabling this narrower sense. The source distribution could be offered individually to each recipient of binaries _or_ made generally available to the public independent of any existing exchange of binaries between two parties. So the GPL allowed the recipient to transitively distribute the sources they have received, but does not actually obligate the original distributor to also provide sources to other unrelated parties.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago> So the GPL [...] does not actually obligate the original distributor to also provide sources to other unrelated parties. It seems important to note that the Debian Free Software Guidelines as applied by the Debian project specifically exclude any software that requires providing source to unrelated people this way (the “desert island” and “dissident” tests[1]). In practice, the “unrelated” people in license terms of that kind are usually the original copyright holders. [1] https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html