> On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 10:37:10PM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: >> I wrote a blog post on the issue a while back, when Red Hat changed the >> way it handled its GPLv2§2(a) compliance on Linux: >> http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/03/11/linux-red-hat-gpl.html
Richard Fontana wrote at 12:39 (EDT) on Sunday: > This was not a change in the way Red Hat was handling GPLv2§2(a) > compliance on Linux, because Red Hat never had the view that > distributing separated-out patches was a form of GPL compliance in the > first place. To put it another way, compliance with GPLv2§2(a) was > unchanged by this change in packaging practice. Good point, Fontana, and you're (sort of) saying what I said in my blog post (linked above). Namely, that GPLv2§2(a) never required Red Hat to publish a full Git repository of its Linux changes, but that publishing such a git repository is a good contribution to the community. Indeed, IMO, GPLv2§2(a) exists to help downstream use a diachronic approach to understand the software and how it works: that's the spirit of GPLv2§2(a). Ultimately, in early 2011, Red Hat instituted a policy to follow only the letter of the GPLv2§2(a) rather than its spirit. Granted, Red Hat was one of the few for-profit Linux redistributors that *ever* followed the spirit of GPLv2§2(a), so I'm not being particular critical of Red Hat here. I'm sad Red Hat back-slid on this issue, but OTOH, even with this change in policy, Red Hat is still "better" on GPLv2§2(a) than most redistributors. -- -- bkuhn
