On 06/11/2012 07:49 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: [snip]
If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the issues, preferably not in legalese?There are dozens of threads, and there's the acutal licensing in the RPM's and SRPM's. Take a good look in /usr/share/doc/[package-name] for the license agreements, or do "rpm -qi $name | grep -i license" to get a hint of what license a package has. Then go *read* them, individually, rather than attempting to apply a personal mental conception of the GPL on top of the whole distribution. And check out the history of the JDK licensing: Our favoritre upstream vendor has been instrumental in the creation and publication of openjdk, whose suource is openly licensed and does not require the manual or commercial registration with Sun to use binaries.
The above mentioned licenses, agreements, and restrictive covenants are written in legalese. Legalese requires explanation by a law professional, and the actual meaning of the same language can change depending upon the nation-state or larger entity under which the language is interpreted, unlike science and engineering concepts and even terminology -- the same legalese language has different meanings in different legal systems (nation-states). As I am not such a law professional in any nation-state, let alone a practitioner of the situations under which these licenses are interpreted across many nation-states, the documents have little utility for me, an opinion held by many colleagues I know in industry, let alone the academy, who instead defer to legal professionals. I have read the various GPL versions, and have read a number of the differing interpretations (including some of those of Stallman). It was based upon these readings that I was under the mistaken impression that a for-profit vendor using GPL software sources had to release the sources (not true under some other "open software" licenses). As for keeping these on a public web server (as mentioned earlier in this exchange), I expect that release could mean to release the source on media at a sensible cost. (If the claim for burning a DVD-ROM of GPL source and putting it into a surface carrier were, say, $1M US, no rational person could claim this was sensible cost. A for-profit vendor could perhaps justify a charge of $100 US plus shipping.)
