Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 15, 2020 17:26 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Changing CentOS in mid-stream by paulj
Parent article: Changing CentOS in mid-stream

> You're just wrong on the definition of medium. A network can be a medium. HTTP over the internet can be a medium. Air can be a medium. Light can be a medium. Quantum entanglement can be a medium.

In other words, by virtue of their use of HTTP over the internet, Red Hat is using "a medium customarily used for software interchange" to distribute their complete corresponding source code.

> I think it pretty obvious how collapsing and removing information about the constitution of code obfuscates it - be it by a compiler transforming C code into object code; or a RedHat src.rpm building system turning a series of commits in a git tree into one big blog of a patch.

Please stop bringing up the red herring of distributing [partially] compiled sources, because (1) everyone agrees that is an explicit GPL violation, and (2) RH has never done that.

What's being "obfuscated" are the sequence and history of individual changes. The *source code* is the same either way.

Meanwhile, it's been nearly a decade since RH made this change -- see https://lwn.net/Articles/432012/ -- and nothing new has transpired since. You don't have to like what RH is doing. That's fine, a lot of others feel the same way (including our fine LWN editor). However, it is _not_ a GPL violation -- unless you are also arguing that most of what's available on gnu.org is violating the GPL as well. Say what you will about RH, but I trust that the FSF knows how follow their own license.