question about RedHat/Fedora and the GPL

[R P Herrold]

gawd, I hate to jump in as the initial thread has wandered so 
far, and seems OT, but there are a couple clear items needing 
correction, under the GPL para 3 stanza.

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Michael A. Peters wrote:

> beehive does not effect the build of the package.
> an rpm built by my typing
>
> rpmbuild --rebuild foobar.src.rpm
>
> is NOT going to be different than if something else builds it.
> The spec file is included in the src.rpm

Clearly false. My (documented) research, the experience at 
cAos, and in some of the RHEL rebuilds, and that of others, 
clearly show that it certainly matters a lot as to the build 
environment, and pre-arguments, defines, and arguments passed 
in to the builder.  These settings are argueably covered under
GPL 3, para following c), which is pretty explicit:

"For an executable work, complete source code means all the 
source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated 
interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control 
compilation and installation of the executable."

------------

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, seth vidal wrote:

> b/c everyone who has had a lawyer review it say the same 
> thing that beehive doesn't have to be released under the gpl

True enough, so far as it goes; 'release of beehive' code 
itself.  But if the argument is that one may conceal from a 
covered recipient under the GPL, the state of the build 
environment which controls rpmbuild, autogen, ./configure, 
etc, I certainly know of at least two lawyers who differ. We 
presented in a panel discussion a couple years ago on the GPL, 
and hit this topic at the Ohio Linuxfest 2003 ;)

<include IA_AL disclaimer>
-- Russ Herrold