Joe Greco wrote:
When I worked at Microsoft, our legal department allowed us to redistribute RHEL in house for competitive work. This was about 2 years ago, and I read the EULA at that time.On 14-Oct-2004, Joe Greco wrote:
The GPL strips some of these freedoms by forcing the distribution ofThis is not what is concerning about RedHat's behavior.
source code. It does not, however, prevent the code from being sold.
Then I apologize, I thought the point was that they were selling it, but perhaps you've got a finer point here that I missed. Sorry. :-)
They require you to purchase RHEL if you intend to use it. I don't misunderstand
the GPL in that it allows them to sell RHEL. I am confused how they can disallow people from using it without payment.
RedHat further encumbers RHEL with a EULA which extends the GPL and
further restricts your rights to use the product.
That, then, sounds like it might be a violation of the GPL. The GPL is, sadly, a maze of twisty little untested legal strategies, and even
the IP lawyers don't know for sure.
At the time, it did NOT say that you could not use the software in any way you want. Rather it said that if you used the services, you had to agree to play by certain rules. These included the obligation to either buy support for all systems or none (to prevent a support shell game) etc.
Bearing in mind that it is highly unlikely (but nonetheless possible) that RedHat is able to distribute the code under a non-GPL'd license, of course. I would imagine that this would require the permission of thousands of contributors. They almost certainly haven't done that. Let's see what they did.... (read, read, read)
I haven't read all of this extensively, nor have I had our IPL look at it, but it kind of looks like they're using some bizarre combination of trademark protection and transferrence of responsibility to make what you're talking about sort-of happen.
Section 1 of the EULA says, essentially, "go ahead, it's GPL".
Section 2 of the EULA says, essentially, "But we own our trademark and you cannot distribute that and we've stamped it all over the place. So if you distribute it you better damn well remove them all and woe to you if you fsck up."
This would be a change from what I read....
Perhaps things have changed.... Wonder what their reasoning is.
Is their EULA posted online?
Best Wishes, Chris travers Metatron Technology Consulting
begin:vcard fn:Chris Travers n:Travers;Chris email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] x-mozilla-html:FALSE version:2.1 end:vcard
_______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
