On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 06:21, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 08:20, Miguel Angel Diaz
>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> I agree with you that packages have their own licenses.
>>>
>>> But my question follows in other way. Imagine I want to create
>>> other .iso based on S.L.iso. I need to read .iso license to know if I am
>>> doing well.
>>>
>>> Regards.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Ok I understand the question, and will try to better explain it to others.
>>
>> A package by itself has a license, but so does the distribution as a
>> whole. The Fedora distribution and original Red Hat Linux distribution
>> were licensed under the GPL v2. Miguel is wondering what license Fermi
>> is offering the distribution under as this affects how others can use
>> the distribution, derive child distributions etc from it.
>
> GPLv2 cannot override the licensing of GPLv3 or Apache or BSD licensed
> components included in the distribution, and the "original Red Hat"
> distributions of RHEL include licenses for oddball components like
> Sun's Java. (They're oftion in the "optional" software channels".) For
> examples of *components* under different licensing.

You are correct, and I am sorry if I gave that impression anywhere as
that was not my intent.

Copyright law is very complicated. Each file has its own copyright,
each compiled item has its own copyright and by bundling those things
together one creates a work that also has a copyright. In books the
analogy is a bunch of short stories each having their own copyright,
but collection also has its own copyright. Copyright defaults to few
if any rights allowed to anyone but the author. The author gives up
certain rights when they sell the book or allow it to become part of a
collection that is sold. What those rights are depends on the type of
item, the type of collection and the licensing involved.

In software code, I could create a work that is a combination of code,
but because of how it is compiled, a user may not get the rights they
would have if they had gotten it in another format. [The web case and
the AGPL is one form, and I expect there are other forms.] Thus one
must also license the combined works in some format that is A)
compatible with the parts you are combining and B) Meets other goals.

I will admit that the above is a layman's review of a layman's
description of how copyright works. As with all things dealing with
Law, if it really matters to you, pay for an explanation from a lawyer
who is versed in Copyright law for the situation you want to deal
with.

> Don't *get* me started on the licensing weirdness that used to
> surround Dan Bernstein's tools, such as daemontools and djbdns, or the
> email client pine. There are reasons those don't make it into default
> distribution with our favorite upstream vendor.
>



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren