On 06/20/2014 03:55 AM, Dag Wieers wrote:
>
> It may have become a legal question now that the SRPMs are no longer 
> available from ftp.redhat.com. That in itself is an unwelcome change.
>

GPL does not require sources to be released to the public; the 
requirement is to release sources to the same people to whom you 
distributed the binaries (and of the same version).  The GPL FAQ covers 
this pretty well.  I'm well aware of both sides to this issue, and I 
sympathize both with the enterprise linux distributors wanting to stay 
in business in a competitive climate as well as the larger community 
wanting to have open rebuilds of those enterprise distributions.

It is an unfortunate change, yes, but I prefer to give Red Hat the 
benefit of the doubt as far as motivations go, since they could close it 
up completely like SuSE has with SLES and SLED (OpenSuSE is SuSE's 
Fedora, so it doesn't count).  And SuSE is completely within its rights 
under GPL to do how they are doing; this is not a jab against SuSE, 
since SuSE has also done and is doing a lot of great work for open 
source.  (Of course, since I haven't looked for publicly posted source 
for SLES in a while, they may have posted it since I last looked and I 
just don't know about it.)