[BozemanGLUG] maddog sounds off on the RHEL situation

[Joshua J. Cogliati]

Hm, to the extent that this is actual Redhat policy (as opposed to what 
the Redhat marketing department is implying), then your freedom is 
rather limited. On the other hand, I have not read anything that really 
convinces me that Redhat is currently dropping customers who 
redistribute RHEL GNU GPL code.  This reminds me of an old joke (ha, ha, 
its only true):

Q:      How does the Polish Constitution differ from the American?
A:      Under the Polish Constitution citizens are guaranteed freedom of
         speech, but under the United States constitution they are
         guaranteed freedom after speech.
                 -- being told in Poland, 1987

I do completely agree that it is hard making money off of GNU GPL software.

Joshua Cogliati

P.S. If I recall correctly, the Redhat marketing department spent a lot 
of time when Fedora first arrived saying that Fedora would eat your 
brains, or something like that.  (Maybe that is my problem, my brains 
have been eaten by using Fedora...)

On 8/1/23 21:06, Scott Dowdle wrote:
> As a Red Hat customer, you can redistribute and modify and redistribute all you want.  You just might end up losing your Red Hat subscription.  If that were to happen, you can still keep the source and redistribute it all you want.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>>
>> 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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