Fwd: Possible GPL violation by Red Hat/Dell alliance

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   From: David Kramer <david at thekramers.net>
   Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 19:40:57 -0500

   That is false, and is in fact the biggest area in which RMS and ESR
   disagree.  RMS (and, by extention, the FSF), is really against
   charging for software.  Period.  He has slipped a little in the
   last year or so, but that has almost always been his position.
   Free as in Beer is just as important as Free as in Speech.  I have
   heard it from his lips personally.

I'm not entirely convinced by that, considering that the GNU project
has long charged for tapes and such.  From
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html:

      I could have said, "Find a friend who is on the net and who will
      make a copy [of GNU Emacs] for you." Or I could have done what I
      did with the original PDP-10 Emacs: tell them, "Mail me a tape
      and a SASE, and I will mail it back with Emacs on it." But I had
      no job, and I was looking for ways to make money from free
      software. So I announced that I would mail a tape to whoever
      wanted one, for a fee of $150. In this way, I started a free
      software distribution business, the precursor of the companies
      that today distribute entire Linux-based GNU systems.

In the same essay, RMS also cites as one of the essential freedoms of
free software "You have the right to redistribute copies, either
gratis or for a fee".

Perhaps RMS has said that zero price is just as important as freedom,
but I've never seen any confirmed example of that.  I've certainly 

   It is also against the GPL to not distribute, or make available,
   the source code for any product that has GPL code in it, including
   the source code for the non-GPL'ed parts.  This is the silver
   bullet that keeps just barely missing M$FT.  Making money off of
   distributing GPL software is not agains the GPL though.

That's not true, either.  Certainly any code that's a derivative work
of code licensed under the GPL must itself be released under terms no
less free than those of the GPL, but that only applies to derived
works.  It can't apply to works that aren't derived; the licensed is
based on copyright law, not contract law.  The GPL is cast in terms of
"works" (in the copyright sense), not in terms of "products"; if a
product is created by aggregation, or otherwise by avoiding derivation
from GPL'ed code, it can be distributed under any terms the
distributor pleases (that are consistent with any other applicable
terms).

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>      

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton