Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution

Bradley M. Kuhn shares some thoughts about Red Hat's GPL compliance. "Meanwhile, what people are actually complaining about is that Red Hat RHEL customers have access to better meta-information about why various patches were applied. Some have argued (quite reasonably) that this information is required under GPLv2§2(a), but usually that section has been interpreted to allow a very terse changelog. [Jon] Corbet's original article mentioned that the Red Hat distribution of the kernel named Linux contains no changelog. I see why he said that, because it took me some time to find it myself (and an earlier version of the blog post was therefore incorrect on that point), but the src.rpm file does have what appears to be a changelog embedded in the kernel.spec file. There's also a simple summary as well that in release notes found in a separate src.rpm (in the file called kernel.xml). This material seems sufficient to me to meet the letter-of-the-license compliance for GPLv2§2(a) requirements. I, too, wish the log were a bit more readable and organized, but, again, the debate isn't about whether there's optimal community cooperation going on, but rather whether this distribution complies with the GPL."

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