On Fri, 20 Jun 2014 09:16:14 -0400
Lamar Owen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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.)


Simply I cannot see the point you're making here. Excuse me but as I see, you're not coming up with any solution but only saying that this is more than alright. But without pointing out its advantage over the former method. You yourself is saying too that there is a gap between RH's release of the sources and their import to the git tree.

Regarding the license: I am more than certain that if I happen to buy supscription to RHEL then I am allowed to do with the GPL'd sources whatever I want while it is between the boundaries of the GPL. It may easily be because I'm not an expert in licence matter, but I cannot come up with an idea how the license could be changed by any lawyers, for example, forbidding the redistribution of the sources. Is that really possible? If so, then could you provide background info or facts on the matter how that is done?

Thank you.