question about RedHat/Fedora and the GPL

[Jos Vos]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 10:08:48AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> I guess it comes down to with what you mean with "control". I'm not a
> lawyer, but control means to me "have impact on the result". The goal is
> that the binary building process is fully reproducable (see earlier
> parts of the license about the rationale). All the parts that impact the
> results are included in the src.rpm (with some global settings from
> redhat-rpm-config which is also shipped). The RH buildsystem actually
> calls rpmbuild to build the binary, all it does on top of that is some
> queueing. Queueing does not impact the outcome of the build in any way. 

Although I agree with most of your comments, two remarks:

-  There seem to be a few settings that are different from redhat-rpm-config:
   see my thread started with

   https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-February/msg00523.html

   about rebuilding pango c.s. that was never really answered...  OK, I can
   imagine what settings it needs, and our local RHEL-rebuild environment
   has implemented that ;-), but that's actually a bit of reverse engineering.
   At least in FC3 (didn't check FC4t* yet) this was still the issue.

-  Except from the build environment software itself, there's always "all
   the software on the build host" that may influence a build (more
   specifically "configure").  This has no direct relation to releasing
   the build environment software, although that software may control it,
   but with this I want to say you'll never be 100% sure to exactly match
   the original environment.  This is also not required by the GPL, IMHO,
   as it can be brought down to even HW/BIOS issues, when you look at it
   from an academical point of view.

For this discussion it's much more interesting to see how vendors of
proprietary software/equipment with GPL stuff included/embedded deal
with this.  There's much more to win in that area, than blaming RH for
not releasing some internal tools: see also <http://gpl-violations.org/>.

-- 
--    Jos Vos <jos at xos.nl>
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