Red Hat and the GPL [LWN.net]

Red Hat and the GPL

Posted Mar 9, 2011 21:56 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: Red Hat and the GPL by branden
Parent article: Red Hat and the GPL

Ah. I must wistfully admit that I wish you'd had a phone conversation or brief email exchange with Mr. Corbet about this, then. It seemed to be an example that was eminent in his mind when he commented in the past week or so.

Well, I did review the article before it was posted... I don't see how the preprocessor discussion changes things here. The GPL requires distributing the source that you modify. Preprocessing it would violate that; shipping your source tree does not.

As a copyright holder in the kernel, I do not agree with or appreciate Red Hat's move in this area. That is a feeling I have communicated on this site and to the people involved in making the decision. It is a step in the wrong direction.

That does not mean that I believe the GPL can be used to force Red Hat to change its mind. As far as I know, nobody has ever challenged tarball distribution of source in all these years. Why would we try to start now?

I am sorry you do not like the stand we have taken. But I still don't believe that this action, obnoxious as it is, can be called a license violation.

(Log in to post comments)

Red Hat and the GPL

Posted Mar 10, 2011 0:43 UTC (Thu) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]

"The GPL requires distributing the source that you modify. Preprocessing it would violate that"

The text of the GPL does not mention the C preprocessor. "Everybody knows" that running source through cpp prior to distribution renders it violative of the GPL. Because this is a comfortable old truth, we haven't troubled ourselves to re-justify it from first principles again.

I think that if you explicitly articulate the reasons why post-preprocessed source code is inadequate to meet the definition of source code under the GNU GPL, the case against Red Hat's monolithification of their kernel SRPMS will become more clear.

I have tried to elucidate the matter myself, but I am clearly not a persuasive enough exponent.