On 06/12/2012 03:49 AM, Yasha Karant wrote: > On 06/11/2012 08:39 AM, Connie Sieh wrote: >> Policy on Scientific Linux(SL) Life Cycle >> >> We plan on following the TUV Life Cycle. Currently that is a total of >> 10 years. See http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/ >> We expect to continue releasing Scientific Linux(SL) just >> as we have in the past. * >> >> * Provided TUV continues to make the source rpms publicly available >> >> -Connie Sieh >> -Pat Riehecky > > Am I missing something here? I thought under the GPL as well as various > other open source licenses, TUV was required to make available the full > source from which the full non-encumbered distro could be built > (non-encumbered means excluding any proprietary drivers, etc., that > "taint the kernel"). TUV can split things up in such a way as to make it > very difficult to build the system from source, but not impossible (no > components eliminated, no documentation eliminated , e.g., source > without "readme" files). The only thing that must be eliminated are the > TUV logos and trademarks, but the internal TUV authorship credit on all > of source files must be retained. > > If I am missing something, is there a discussion link (URL) of the > issues, preferably not in legalese? This is a very common misconception. TUV is *not* mandated to post the sources publicly for the benefit of non-customers. They *do* have a mandate to give full sources to anyone who pays for their product. That is, if you purchase TUV's binary product you have the right to demand a copy of the source code to any program covered under an open source license within the distro -- which is everything in the base distro. Considered another way, no company is under a legal burden to spend money maintaining public servers to provide all its open source code to non-customers. TUV has very good reasons for doing so anyway, though, and they aren't going to stop doing this any time soon.