Once again...

Posted Mar 4, 2011 17:52 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

If you think Red Hat is using the threat of lawyers to stop people from distributing the patches ("Our lawyers are always ready to discuss your proof in the court of law."), then that's even worse. That throws a huge chill over collaborative kernel development. Even I don't think Red Hat is that bad; I believe they won't actually sue anyone for distributing the patches.

If they'll sue or not remains to be seen. But they reserve the right to do so - like Microsoft reserves the right to do so (WRT Mono).

If you believe that's what Red Hat is doing, then it's even worse that what I'm claiming it's doing. If what you say is true, then Red Hat is deliberately blocking collaborative kernel development and adding legal threats to its arsenal against anyone using its patches. Do you think that's in the spirit of the GPL?

Well, it's good question. Probably not. But... FSF itself developed GNU programs (like emacs or gcc) behind the closed doors for years. When the programs were released they were released as tarballs only - access to the VCS was restricted even fater that. Of course they have not threatened you with lawers and when EGCS project decided to fork GCC they they allowed them to take patches from private tree, but it happened when developers convinced RMS to conduct this experiment, not when they decided that they have unalienable right to publish them...