On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> 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-
Stop *right*there. Take a very good look at the software in "our favorite vendor's" distribution. much of it is not GPL, it's Apache license for HTTPD and Subversion, it's GPL for he Linux kernel, It's the OpenBSD license for OpenSSH, the Linux kernel is GPLv2, the Perl modules have a frightening variety of licenses but mostly the CPAN license, Kerberos is under an MIT license, and even the Java toolkits have different licenses for different run-time environments and development kits. Then there are the patents. Oh, lord, the patents.
Our favorite upstream vendor does a very good job of contributing under GPL, and trying to get projects published and released under GPL, and I really applaud them for it. They really pay attention to doing it legally and openly, and Scientific Linux is one of the benefits of it. (Development and enhancement of all those tools I just mentioned, and hundreds if not thousands of others, is the benefit of this approach: it's partly why I buy the licenses when I can, and encourage commercial clients to do so.)
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?
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.