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It'll be interesting indeed...It'll be interesting indeed...Posted Mar 5, 2011 16:01 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Commitment to Open ? by ewan Parent article: Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)
There is no good outcome for Red Hat here; either this move pisses off community people and doesn't inconvenience Oracle at all, or it does inconvenience Oracle and they sue. Wow. Interesting theory we have here. Now, why will they sue? RedHat have not invented this "monolythic-patch-for-everyone, VCS access to selected few" scheme. This distinction belongs to other well-known organization: FSF. For quite a few years GCC, Emacs and other FSF-sponsored programs were developed behind the closed doors and only releases were dumped on FTP. Essentially what the RedHat is doing. To argue that RedHat treats GPL improperly you must argue that FSF treated GPL improperly for years - and this is not so easy to do, believe me. P.S. It's interesting to note that community was pissed off back then too - but they fixed it introducing EGCS fork which was accepted by everyone, no by using courts to sue FSF.
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It'll be interesting indeed... Posted Mar 6, 2011 15:08 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
FSF require copyright assignement, so nobody had standing to sue anyway.
It'll be interesting indeed... Posted Mar 6, 2011 20:13 UTC (Sun) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
That's a completely orthogonal issue. Copyright assignment only restricts the merging of contributions to the upstream tree, and has nothing to do with the form in which that tree is made available to outsiders.
It'll be interesting indeed... Posted Mar 7, 2011 19:14 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] No, it isn't. FSF requires copyright assignment before they accept your changes. Once you have assigned copyright to them, they can well do as they please with your changes, i.e., distributing them (or not) in whatever form they desire. Nobody has any legal standing to sue them over what they do with their own stuff. Once somebody else gets, say, GCC, from the FSF, they are bound to honor GPL. Saying that FSF usually has distributed their packages only as monolithic tarballs is sort of a red hering. But others have followed suit, and FSF didn't say a word. So, in a sense they have set an example by their own actions and what they have allowed historically. And this could presumably be important in case some court considers ruling on what GPL's meaning of "preferred form for modification" really means. Also don't forget that for the most part of its history Linux itself was distributed as tarball + monolithic patches as the only format available, and later (in the bitkeeper days) that was still the canonical format. This does weight a lot against the "git trees are the preferred form" arguments.
Actually they do... Posted Mar 8, 2011 8:11 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Nobody has any legal standing to sue them over what they do with their own stuff. Actually they do. FSF's copyright assignment includes promises to the contributor, but yes, it's not GPL, it's separate assignment. It includes words like "machine-readable source code", but does not include words like "preferred form", so it's more relevant to spirit discussion and less relevant to legal discussion. But others have followed suit, and FSF didn't say a word. Actually they said lots of words about Cygnus (which had roughly similar policy to today's RedHat) - and most of them were bad. But again, they were about moral responsibility, etc - and not about legality...
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