On 06/12/2012 03:49 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> On 06/11/2012 08:39 AM, Connie Sieh wrote:
>> Policy on Scientific Linux(SL) Life Cycle
>>
>> We plan on following the TUV Life Cycle. Currently that is a total of
>> 10 years. See http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/
>> We expect to continue releasing Scientific Linux(SL) just
>> as we have in the past. *
>>
>> * Provided TUV continues to make the source rpms publicly available
>>
>> -Connie Sieh
>> -Pat Riehecky
>
> Am I missing something here? I thought under the GPL as well as various
> other open source licenses, TUV was required to make available the full
> source from which the full non-encumbered distro could be built
> (non-encumbered means excluding any proprietary drivers, etc., that
> "taint the kernel"). TUV can split things up in such a way as to make it
> very difficult to build the system from source, but not impossible (no
> components eliminated, no documentation eliminated , e.g., source
> without "readme" files). The only thing that must be eliminated are the
> TUV logos and trademarks, but the internal TUV authorship credit on all
> of source files must be retained.
>
> If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the
> issues, preferably not in legalese?

This is a very common misconception. TUV is *not* mandated to post the 
sources publicly for the benefit of non-customers. They *do* have a 
mandate to give full sources to anyone who pays for their product. That 
is, if you purchase TUV's binary product you have the right to demand a 
copy of the source code to any program covered under an open source 
license within the distro -- which is everything in the base distro.

Considered another way, no company is under a legal burden to spend 
money maintaining public servers to provide all its open source code to 
non-customers. TUV has very good reasons for doing so anyway, though, 
and they aren't going to stop doing this any time soon.