On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Aaron Toponce <aaron.topo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up, so I'll mention it.
>
> Google keeps an internal proprietary derivative of Ubuntu on their
> employee workstations. They have never released this "Goobuntu" to the
> wild, and as such are under no obligation to release their changes. Even
> if the code is GPL.
I'm not sure why you're surprised, as it doesn't really seem relevant.
Individual packages within Ubuntu may be GPL-licensed, but the whole
distribution doesn't have an overarching license agreement, and I
don't think the GPL would work for that either. If they made changes
to specific packages that were GPL-licensed and didn't distribute
them, that would illustrate a point, but I don't think it's a point
that anyone was confused about.
At work we have a wireshark plugin for an in-house protocol that we
don't distribute. We also developed a couple of decoders for
protocols we're helping to develop through IEEE, and we submitted
those back upstream. You can find me in the AUTHORS file, though it
may not be in a stable release version yet. Sometimes it's useful to
have our in-house protocol and the IEEE draft protocols in the same
build, but we've got to be careful not to distribute those builds when
we're sending out builds with the draft protocol updates to people
we're working with. It's a minor annoyance, but annoying nonetheless.
--Levi
/*
PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net
Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug
Don't fear the penguin.
*/
