GRsecurity violating GPLv2 themselves by prohibiting redistribution

Posted Jun 1, 2016 20:48 UTC (Wed) by Felix (guest, #36445)
In reply to: GRsecurity violating GPLv2 themselves by prohibiting redistribution by zdzichu
Parent article: Grsecurity stable patches to be limited to sponsors

still from a license perspective (IANAL) this shouldn't matter. The GPL requires that all receivers of a binary (e.g. paying customers) also get the source code under the terms of the GPL. It seems (see RHEL) as if it is legal not to renew support contracts in case the customer shares the source under the GPL.

Red Hat is still pretty helpful as they share some form of their source code publicly but that should matter with regards to the GPL.

I have my own gripes with grsecurity but I fail to where the GPL violation is with regards to the OP.

GRsecurity violating GPLv2 themselves by prohibiting redistribution

Posted Jun 1, 2016 21:32 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

> The GPL requires that all receivers of a binary (e.g. paying customers) also get the source code under the terms of the GPL.

This is slightly inaccurate in a way that tends to cause confusion. When you perform commercial distribution under GPLv2, you have two options:

1) Provide the source code alongside the binaries
2) Provide the source code to anyone who asks, whether they got binaries or not

In this case it's basically irrelevant because (as far as my understanding goes) they're providing the source code itself to customers, and so GPLv2 section 3 doesn't apply.

GRsecurity violating GPLv2 themselves by prohibiting redistribution

Posted Jun 2, 2016 8:22 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Right, but this isn't about whether the vendor is required to make these things available to Joe Public, but whether the vendor can then restrict their customers from exercising their GPL rights to redistribute the source onward by making them choose between support and their GPL rights.