[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Les Mikesell]

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 11:23 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 10:50 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 01:38:44PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>>>> I know the FSF-definition very well. They are defining free in the sense
>>>>> of "open source"
>>>> I don't think they agree with you there, in fact Richard would probably
>>>> be most
>>>> upset at such a claim...
>>> May-be, may-be not.
>>>
>>> Fact is: The GPL's notion of freedom is essentially covering freedom on
>>> "source code". It's "viral" nature has has some implications on binaries
>>> ("make source code available to customers"), but it nowhere states that
>>> binaries having been built from GPL'ed sources must be "free-beer".
>> There is no distinction between binaries and source in regard to the rights
>> recipients have to redistribute them, except for the point that if you
>> distribute binaries at all you must also make the corresponding source
>> available to the recipeints.
>>
> 
> Do you have a lawyers advice on that? A courts decision on that? I ask
> because I have yet to see legal advice that says that versus common
> "well if I were the law, this is what I would interpret it to be."

I'm sure you could pay a lawyer to argue either side for you if you 
wanted, but I don't see any possible way to avoid the conclusion that a 
binary is a derivative of the original source and the license explicitly 
states that it applies to all derivative works.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com