Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 16, 2020 16:27 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Changing CentOS in mid-stream by paulj
Parent article: Changing CentOS in mid-stream

> These users are already outside of the spirit of the GPL, as far as I'm concerned. They are taking freedoms away from others. I have no time or sympathy for them. I will be glad to see that loophole closed off in future copyleft licences.

So you want to discriminate between users - which is FORBIDDEN by the *concept* of copyleft. You won't - can't - find a copyleft licence that agrees with you. (Oh - and as I pointed out - the GPLv3 not only did not attempt to close that loophole, it quite deliberately opened it even wider!)

And those same users you have no sympathy for includes a LOT of hardware vendors - if you hadn't noticed, a lot of kernel developers feel similarly to you. The *problem* is that, as soon as you have the sort of licence *you* desire, the practical consequence will be that linux is sidelined and becomes completely irrelevant.

Sadly, sometimes practicality has to trump idealism, or the idealists will become irrelevant sighing winds in the desert :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 16, 2020 16:53 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yes, I want to discriminate between users who'd like to make changes, distribute those to customers and deny them to the rest of the community - for their competitive advantage. Which is a type of discrimination the GPL /already/ has!

Some users think they've found a loophole, that is against the spirit of the GPL and copyleft. (And I completely disagree with you that the spirit of copyleft /intentionally/ allows for corporates to restrict re-distribution of modifications by their downstreams - that's absurd, the entire point of copyleft is to ensure the recipients get the right to distribute!).

I don't get your point about hardware vendors. If you mean the likes of graphics vendors with closed blobs, they may well be in direct violation of the GPL already - that's not the case I'm talking about.

I sense I'm down a rabbit hole with you.