On 4/5/21 12:28 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> ...
> If IBM decides to enforce IP control over what does not have to be 
> released under the GPL, BSD, Linux, etc., licenses, one would not have 
> a buildable "clone".  Am I correct?
I think that's pretty much what I've been saying for a while.

> ...If Canonical decided to "do an IBM RH", it would need to start a 
> non-Debian derivative.  Is this correct?
This is drifting off-topic by a great deal, and thus I'm not going to 
engage in a drawn-out discussion on this; just going to make this brief 
set of statements.  As far as I know, your statement is correct only for 
packages that come from Debian proper. Ubuntu-created packages within 
Ubuntu are released as Canonical deems fit and within the license of the 
upstream software.  So far they have been good stewards with that, 
releasing everything.  But, Canonical could take pieces that aren't 
under GPL and aren't sourced from Debian and make those pieces closed 
source.

Let's take an example of a Debian derivative that is not completely open 
source and in fact has critical closed-source components: Raspbian.  
Read up on 'ThreadX' and the Raspberry Pi's architecture to see how a 
critical piece (as in, required for booting) of the Raspbian OS is 
distributed without source, yet without violating the Debian licenses.