On 4/5/21 12:28 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
...
If IBM decides to enforce IP control over what does not have to be
released under the GPL, BSD, Linux, etc., licenses, one would not have
a buildable "clone". Am I correct?
I think that's pretty much what I've been saying for a while.
...If Canonical decided to "do an IBM RH", it would need to start a
non-Debian derivative. Is this correct?
This is drifting off-topic by a great deal, and thus I'm not going to
engage in a drawn-out discussion on this; just going to make this brief
set of statements. As far as I know, your statement is correct only for
packages that come from Debian proper. Ubuntu-created packages within
Ubuntu are released as Canonical deems fit and within the license of the
upstream software. So far they have been good stewards with that,
releasing everything. But, Canonical could take pieces that aren't
under GPL and aren't sourced from Debian and make those pieces closed
source.
Let's take an example of a Debian derivative that is not completely open
source and in fact has critical closed-source components: Raspbian.
Read up on 'ThreadX' and the Raspberry Pi's architecture to see how a
critical piece (as in, required for booting) of the Raspbian OS is
distributed without source, yet without violating the Debian licenses.
