I believe that Mr. Yatnatti's arguments on this topic are very much relevant and definitely *not* a troll. His communication style might not please everyone though. :)
That said, for all the questions I had raised some weeks back against Redhat's ambiguous distribution policy, this thread by him and many other text have changed my perception of Redhat's distribution policy. I don't believe they are in violation of GPL, in fact they are using a unique combination of GPL and trademark law to accommodate, in their own way, both community and commercial interests. You can debate endlessly about your intepretation of the spirit of GPL but at least its words are not being violated. You, of course, cannot put up Redhat's ISOs for download on bittorrent, but their trademark is only on the distribution of a few of the Redhat specific packages and not on its other components, which can be freely distributed and therefore satisfy the Free Software distribution guidelines. In fact, if you check this CentOs page, all the Redhat software source is freely available: http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=2. The Redhat specific packages which are non-free because of Redhat's trademark restrictions are made Free software by CentOS (by removing the trademarks) and can then be freely redistributed. Mr. Yatnatti might be confusing software freedom with GPL or even FSF. GPL/FSF are not the only representatives of free software, even though they are its most prominent leaders. There are other interpretations of software freedom too, some not always agreed by all the proponents of the software freedom movement. In fact, Debian has probably an even more stringent definition of freedom. By it's parameters, probably the RHL distribution would fail the freedom guidelines just like various mozilla foundation software like Firefox and Thunderbird have failed. That doesn't mean that Firefox and Mozilla are not "free" software. It just means that they fail someone else's (in this case Debian's) expectation of freedom. Another frequent clash of interpretation of freedom is between the BSD and the Linux+GPL community. Nobody is wrong in their expectations - they are just different ideas of what the software world should be. So I am not sure whether you will ever succeed in convincing other's about Redhat's "violation" of GPL terms. They follow it to the T. They might not satisfy *your* idea of what software freedom should be but they are satisfying GPL's idea of freedom, and therefore they are not doing anything illegal. - Sandip _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
