2 Nov
2004
2 Nov
'04
8:27 a.m.
Brent Frère wrote:
The RedHat behaviour leads to declarations of
high-tech leaders that says that
due to the support conditions imposed by "OpenSource" companies such as RedHat,
RedHat Linux is actually becoming proprietary software. I was shocked when I
heard this, and that's why I wished to check the exact licence conditions. I
slowly begins to conclude that indeed, through its mandatory and very
restrictive agreement conditions, the RedHat distribution does not meet anymore
the criterias imposed by the GPL, nor the very basic principles of Free
Software.
What are your conclusions about this ?
My understanding is that the GPL protects only the source code and not
the binaries:
1. Redhat *must* provide you the source code of their modified GPL
software if you buy their product.
2. You have the freedom to reproduce, modify and use the source code on
as many machines you want.
3. If you recompile Redhat yourself using the included source code, you
get an almost exact copy of the Redhat binaries, which are free (copy,
modify and use). You do not have to do it yourself, or buy a copy of
Redhat (WS, ES, AS) to get the source code, because there are already
people on the net doing this: White Box Enterprise Linux
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
White Box Enterprise Linux is a reproduction of the Redhat Enterprise
binaries using the Redhat source code.
Greetings, Patrick Kaell