Comments | nugget: Letter to FSF on Red Hat GPL compliance:

nugget

Letter to FSF on Red Hat GPL compliance:

Jun 11, 2003 15:51

(Followup: the total of my correspondence with the FSF can be seen
here. The FSF continually demonstrates that they aren't even familiar with the Red Hat EULA, and finally RMS gives me a brushoff because he lacks the energy to read the license.
Today I sent a letter to the FSF asking for their opinion on an apparant discrepancy I've noticed in the ( Read more... )

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Re: think before you write anonymous June 12 2003, 08:42:38 UTC

they license support, not the software (the GPL software).

so how can they audit "support"? supposedly one would violate their EULA if he installs the software on >1 server and then asks RH for support for all these servers.
but how can RH prove someone has done that?
they come to your server room and then what?

incidentally, i was at a customer site today and they asked me about the RH AS licensing.
i checked ibm-sdk and ibm-jdk, they are both GPL. it seems all packages there are GPL.

suppose one gets SRPMS from the source CD ROM and builds RH AS 2.1 on 10 servers. how can that be challenged? RH's EULA is as is - one shouldn't violate support license (or "steal" support) but there is no way they can prevent people post their ISO's on the Web the moment they buy them (at least for the 2.1 version or future versions' GPL packages.

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from the challenge-is-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "David McNett has noticed an apparent discrepancy between the Red Hat Linux EULA and the GPL. He has written an open letter to the FSF asking for their opinion on the matter. Does Red Hat have the right to "audit your facilities and records" to ensure compliance with their license?" McNett misreads the Red Hat documents. Their contract is for the various services, not the software, and for the services they are entitled to demand whatever concessions they think the market will bear.

Re: think before you write anonymous June 12 2003, 16:52:51 UTC

The binary ISO's from what I recall have binary images that are not covered under a redistributable arrangement, so in order to redistribute them Redhat AS CD's, you would have to remove the Images and replace them with something else.

Re: think before you write anonymous June 12 2003, 19:52:27 UTC

>so how can they audit "support"?

The support and services are per machine.

>supposedly one would violate their EULA if he installs the software on >1 server and then asks RH for support for all these servers.
>but how can RH prove someone has done that?

If unregistered/unsupported machines use Red Hat Network, they can tell. Tech support personnel can also often easily tell if someone calls with very certain issues and call back with other seemingly unrelatable issues, or hardware that is obviously not the same as the entitled machines. But, it's hard in either case to prove.

>they come to your server room and then what?

Probably just cancel all support and network entitlements.

Re: think before you write anonymous June 12 2003, 21:19:05 UTC

>>so how can they audit "support"?
>The support and services are per machine.
That's right.
I mean - I wouldn't violate their support license.
I would use one machine as "golden master" for downloading RPM updates to serve as archive for other AS servers. Then have a cronjob (scp root@gold:/root/updates . and send mail to root "new update released") on other AS servers to get updates from the main machine.

>>supposedly one would violate their EULA if he installs the software on >1 server and then asks RH for support for all these servers.
>>but how can RH prove someone has done that?

>If unregistered/unsupported machines use Red Hat Network, they can tell. Tech support personnel can also often easily tell if someone calls with very certain issues and call back with other seemingly unrelatable issues, or hardware that is obviously not the same as the entitled machines. But, it's hard in either case to prove.

You're right - if you connect with different hosts, they can tell. I meant this: if one does not violate their service agreement (use AS in a manner described above) and only installs RH AS on more servers than one, how can they claim you have violated their license even if you've installed AS on more servers than one?

>>they come to your server room and then what?
>Probably just cancel all support and network entitlements.
I think most companies are afraid of such news breaking out so most would probably just pay up to settle things down.

It's good the licensing got challenged...

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