On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 6:00 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Nope. They're entirely distinct repositories with straight imports
> applied as step one, no cloning of the upstream RHEL git repos.

Not exactly what I meant; see below.

>> This seems a minimal requirement for sanity. Are you saying this is
>> not what they are doing?
>
> There is nothing in the GPL or open source licenses that require
> publishing your revision history.

I did say "sanity", not "legality". But, again, not exactly what I meant.

> And exposing that history can expose internal comments,
> internal employee names, and personal development history of
> proprietary projects that were later factored out of open source or
> GPL code.

The CentOS side does not need the entire revision history in order to
keep their modifications on a separate branch. Even if the imports are
big blobs of changes with no identifiable author or commit message,
they should be on a branch separate from the CentOS modifications. If
not even this much is true, that would obviously be insane.

Next, some way to identify the actual source revisions that go into
each upstream release (and update) is pretty important, too... Unless
SL wants to become just a CentOS derivative rather than a Red Hat
derivative. That seems to be what the RedHat/CentOS folks would like
to see.

If there is no way at all to identify the actual source that went into
the 7.0 release, that is a blatant GPL violation, in my view.
"Somewhere in this haystack of git commits is the source for the
product you bought; good luck finding it" is a clear violation of both
the spirit and (in my opinion) the letter of the GPL.

Actually, come to think of it, doesn't the GPL require the source for
the product to be available on *physical* media for no more than the
cost of reproduction? So what would happen now if a customer asked Red
Hat for a source DVD?

 - Pat