On 06/11/2012 07:49 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
[snip]
>     If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the
>     issues, preferably not in legalese?
>
> There are dozens of threads, and there's the acutal licensing in the
> RPM's and SRPM's. Take a good look in /usr/share/doc/[package-name] for
> the license agreements, or do "rpm -qi $name | grep -i license" to get
> a hint of what license a package has. Then go *read* them, individually,
> rather than attempting to apply a personal mental conception of the GPL
> on top of the whole distribution. And check out the history of the JDK
> licensing: Our favoritre upstream vendor has been instrumental in the
> creation and publication of openjdk, whose suource is openly licensed
> and does not require the manual or commercial registration with Sun to
> use binaries.

The above mentioned licenses, agreements, and restrictive covenants are 
written in legalese.  Legalese requires explanation by a law 
professional, and the actual meaning of the same language can change 
depending upon the nation-state or larger entity under which the 
language is interpreted, unlike science and engineering concepts and 
even terminology -- the same legalese language has different meanings in 
different legal systems (nation-states).  As I am not such a law 
professional in any nation-state, let alone a practitioner of the 
situations under which these licenses are interpreted across many 
nation-states, the documents have little utility for me, an opinion held 
by many colleagues I know in industry, let alone the academy, who 
instead defer to legal professionals.  I have read the various GPL 
versions, and have read a number of the differing interpretations 
(including some of those of Stallman).  It was based upon these readings 
that I was under the mistaken impression that a for-profit vendor using 
GPL software sources had to release the sources (not true under some 
other "open software" licenses).  As for keeping these on a public web 
server (as mentioned earlier in this exchange), I expect that release 
could mean to release the source on media at a sensible cost. (If the 
claim for burning a DVD-ROM of GPL source and putting it into a surface 
carrier were, say, $1M US, no rational person could claim this was 
sensible cost.  A for-profit vendor could perhaps justify a charge of 
$100 US plus shipping.)