What's the complaint? [LWN.net]

What's the complaint?

Posted Mar 7, 2011 23:25 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: What's the complaint? by paulj
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

I am not a big RedHat fan, but I have no legalistic problem with them not distributing patches, internal e-mail threads, recordings of internal conversations etc.

that doesn't mean that I think what they are doing is good in this area, just that it is within the letter of the rules. I think that them making this change erodes their moral position, but the GPL isn't dependant on people making good decisions for moral reasons, it's only dependant on people making the decisions to comply with the letter of the license (or if it requires more than just compliance with the letter of the license, there may be a need for a license change, but I don't believe that there is)

the only piece I have a legalistic problem is with them releasing code in some form to users, but only under the condition that those users don't redistribute the code (and if the users violate this condition, penalties kick in)

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What's the complaint?

Posted Mar 8, 2011 7:38 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

It's still not clear they're following the letter of the licence. Here's what likely is happening:

1. RedHat work on the source in form A

2. Form B is auto-generated from A

3. Form B is distributed to comply with the GPL.

A is the src.rpm with the split patches: the format they've preferred for donkey's years and, I'm presuming to be a dead certainty, are continuing to use internally, and B is the src.rpm with the patches deliberately collapsed. Talking about email or conversations is a misdirection - binaries never get machine-built from such. The patches *are* a source input to the process that builds the distributed src.rpms though, and the reason they are an input is because that's RedHats' preferred means of making modifications.

Look at the flow above again, form B *clearly* is covered by the GPL through the text in which explains what "preferred form" is meant to cover. It's pretty explicit that intermediate transformations of the sources are *not* sufficient, that *all* the files required for input to the build process are required.

Just because an auto-generated file is still human-readable and editable does not take-away from the fact it's not the original source.