On 06/13/2012 01:31 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> 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.)

Markets set prices unless the government enforces others by a monopoly 
on violence (consider the history of the Indian woven fabrics industry 
and how silly that got). So don't go off about ridiculous prices. 
Anyway, nobody can enforce "sensible" legally, especially in the United 
States. I can charge you a million dollars for anything I want to -- but 
all licenses that conform to the OSD mandate that the price of source 
cannot exceed *or* compound on the price of a program binary, so if you 
paid for the binary you already paid for source, regardless whether 
anyone feels the price was "sensible" or not.

To break all the legalese down for you:

1- TUV does not have to make sources public. Ever. No license requires 
this as a term of the type of customer-client relationship TUV engages in.

2- TUV does have to provide sources to its paying customers if they want 
it. Customers can decline this if they choose. You are not a paying 
customer unless you paid TUV for something.

3- TUV makes most sources public because they benefit from it and they 
are a swell bunch of guys.

Further explanation of any point above becomes necessarily complex, so 
don't ask unless you want complex answers or to do your own research.