On Friday 10 January 2014 01:14:02 Ian Murray wrote:
> On 10/01/14 00:16, jdow wrote:
> > Don't forget that GPL means you must have the sources available when
> > asked for. 

And this obligation only applies to Red Hat's customers, not to us.

> I have been struggling with this myself tbh. If RH adds a line in a GPL
> program that says "Welcome to Red Hat", releases the binary as RHEL and
> then modifies it for CentOS to read "Welcome to CentOS" and only
> releases the source that says "Welcome to CentOS", then they are in
> technical violation of the GPL, I would say. (IANAL).

No, if you received the CentOS binaries you are only entitled to receive the 
sources to those binaries (not the Red Hat ones).

GPL does not mandate that sources get released publicly, only to parties to 
whom a program has been directly distributed. Folks who are not Red Hat 
customers have not received programs from Red Hat, we've received the same 
programs from other places (CentOS, SL, or to be more legally accurate, mirror 
locations) and it is those other projects/providers who are obliged to make 
programs available in source form.

The fact that the GPL and related licenses also guarantee that any customer 
can distribute the source (but not a copy of the binary) to anyone they want 
means its almost impossible to can or gag a successful piece of GPL software. 
As a business it is better to control that release process than to be 
blindsided by it, so Red Hat has fully embraced the open source community idea 
and always provided public access to source -- but they are not obligated to 
do so.