[ale] Red Hat and the GPL

[Chris Ricker]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Bob Toxen wrote:

> The portions of the GPL that seem most relevant to me are:
> 
>      "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
>      anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the
>      rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for
>      you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
>      ...
>      "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy,
>      and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange
>      for a fee.
> Warranty protection means, I believe, that Red Hat may charge money for
> fixing bugs.  However, it cannot put "per seat" or "per system" restrictions
> or fees on patches for GPL'ed code.  I.e., they must make patches (usually
> engineered by an Open Source entity other than Red Hat) available for a
> low cost or at no cost.

You're mistaken as to what RH does. RH does not charge for patches, or for 
bug fixes. They're freely downloadable by all (even non-customers -- more 
than the GPL demands) from ftp.redhat.com.

What RH charges for, with RHN and RHEL support contracts, is the service of
them automatically delivering those same patches to you. If you don't want
that service, don't pay for it and use the freely available patches. If you
do, agree to their license, pay the service fee, and go for it, subject to 
the terms of the license of their service.

This is not a GPL violation.

>      "These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
>      identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,
>      and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in
>      themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those
>      sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you
>      distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work
>      based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the
>      terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend
>      to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of
>      who wrote it.
> 
> That requirement seems to make illegal Red Hat's published policy of
> forbidding others from redistributing "Red Hat Linux" in either original
> or modified form claiming that to do so would be illegally using Red Hat's
> trademarked images scattered throughout the boot process, documentation,
> and elsewhere.  It appears to me the "These requirements apply to the
> modified work as a whole."  requirement of the GPL expressly forbid
> this practice.

The only way your interpretation would be true is if it were legally the
case that including a GPL'ed program on a CD automatically made that CD
subject to the GPL. That's not true, although some opponents of the GPL
sometimes claim it is. Red Hat's CDs are no more subject to the GPL than
Sun's Solaris CDs are, though both certainly contain GPLed programs (and 
those GPLed programs must be distributed by RH and Sun according to the 
terms of the GPL).

Again, this is not a GPL violation.

later,
chris