[BozemanGLUG] maddog sounds off on the RHEL situation

[Joshua J. Cogliati]

It is interesting, and I will try and read the full thing at somepoint, 
but after reading the "tying it all together" section and skimming the 
rest, it (like several other commentaries I have seen on RHEL) seem to 
be missing much thought about freedom 2 and 3 of the FSF four freedoms 
(see for example 
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms ) which I 
quote here:

  * The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  * The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does
    your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is
    a precondition for this.
  * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
  * The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
    (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance
    to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a
    precondition for this.

Basically, if the people who receive the software can't redistribute it, 
then they are missing freedom 2.

 From Maddog's article: "/*Therefore the people who receive those 
binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the 
operating system as they wished…..this was, and is, the essence of the 
GPL*/."

Um, this is only freedom 1, so this is missing the essence of the GNU GPL.

Joshua Cogliati

On 8/1/23 12:56, Scott Dowdle wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> It's quite the read:
> https://www.lpi.org/blog/2023/07/30/ibm-red-hat-and-free-software-an-old-maddogs-view/
>
> I don't think he really articulated the "BSD Unix" thing completely accurately but other than that, I agree totally.
>
> TYL,
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