Additional restrictions on derivative works

Posted Feb 15, 2014 17:15 UTC (Sat) by Otus (subscriber, #67685)
In reply to: Additional restrictions on derivative works by sebas
Parent article: Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

> Binary packages are clearly a derivative work. Putting licenses on top of that is in violation with the GPL and other copyleft licences, which in turn would mean that Canonical could lose its license to use this software.

Wouldn't that be exactly like the Firefox thing, where Mozilla doesn't let you distribute a modified Firefox unless you call it something else?

I.e. controversial but not against the license terms.

Additional restrictions on derivative works

Posted Feb 15, 2014 17:46 UTC (Sat) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (1 responses)

No, Mint doesn't claim that it is Ubuntu. Canonical claims that you need their license if you want to use their packages.

Additional restrictions on derivative works

Posted Feb 16, 2014 1:36 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It sounds like something Red Hat does, just without an actual license. With a subscription, you get access to the binaries (they're not public AFAIK). If you redistribute the binaries, Red Hat stops supporting you (as they are free to do since it's more of a threat than a legally binding contract).

The difference is that Ubuntu publicly offers the binaries, so they can't just not offer them to bad apples. The GPL does enforce restrictions on extra *license* terms, so it seems like they just used a poor mechanism.

Additional restrictions on derivative works

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:16 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Firefox isn't typically distributed under the GPL, so the situations aren't entirely analogous