On 06/11/2012 07:49 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: [snip] > If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the > issues, preferably not in legalese? > > There are dozens of threads, and there's the acutal licensing in the > RPM's and SRPM's. Take a good look in /usr/share/doc/[package-name] for > the license agreements, or do "rpm -qi $name | grep -i license" to get > a hint of what license a package has. Then go *read* them, individually, > rather than attempting to apply a personal mental conception of the GPL > on top of the whole distribution. And check out the history of the JDK > licensing: Our favoritre upstream vendor has been instrumental in the > creation and publication of openjdk, whose suource is openly licensed > and does not require the manual or commercial registration with Sun to > use binaries. The above mentioned licenses, agreements, and restrictive covenants are written in legalese. Legalese requires explanation by a law professional, and the actual meaning of the same language can change depending upon the nation-state or larger entity under which the language is interpreted, unlike science and engineering concepts and even terminology -- the same legalese language has different meanings in different legal systems (nation-states). As I am not such a law professional in any nation-state, let alone a practitioner of the situations under which these licenses are interpreted across many nation-states, the documents have little utility for me, an opinion held by many colleagues I know in industry, let alone the academy, who instead defer to legal professionals. I have read the various GPL versions, and have read a number of the differing interpretations (including some of those of Stallman). It was based upon these readings that I was under the mistaken impression that a for-profit vendor using GPL software sources had to release the sources (not true under some other "open software" licenses). As for keeping these on a public web server (as mentioned earlier in this exchange), I expect that release could mean to release the source on media at a sensible cost. (If the claim for burning a DVD-ROM of GPL source and putting it into a surface carrier were, say, $1M US, no rational person could claim this was sensible cost. A for-profit vendor could perhaps justify a charge of $100 US plus shipping.)