AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Posted Jun 26, 2023 9:46 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change by paulj
Parent article: AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Nope, the URL that they got the binary for was on GitHub and the license says "from the same place where you got the binary, for three years after the binary's release date".

Besides, what if I was just a random guy in Nebraska, I died the day after GitHub banned me, and none of my heirs knows what source is, what a forge is and why you put a dollar sign in there. Should they risk being sued for three years?

AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Posted Jun 26, 2023 14:04 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

The context of this discussion, least for me, is going to stronger forms of copyleft, with new licenses that do not have the loop-holes for restricting who a redistributor must give source to that the GPL does. With my suggestion of something like a modified CDDL+Sybase/Watcom licence. See the link I gave in my great-great*-grandparent comment, which is the context of this discussion for me:

https://lwn.net/Articles/936004/

The condition in that licence is:

" Make the Source Code of all Your Deployed Modifications publicly
available under the terms of this License, for as long as you Deploy
the Covered Software or twenty-four (24) months from the date of
initial Deployment, whichever is longer; through a common and
customary form of distribution for source code (e.g. download from
a web site as a 'tar' archive, or via source-control-mechanism such
as git or hg).
"

There is no requirement in that to make the source and binary be distributed from same place. Or even that that the place of distribution must remain unchanged over the period.

AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change

Posted Jun 26, 2023 14:08 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

And, even if we were talking about the GPL, there is no requirement in it that the source be made available in the same place as the binary was (indeed, the whole premise of the source offer condition is that binary is distributed by some different process to the source).