[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 10:50 -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 01:38:44PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > I know the FSF-definition very well. They are defining free in the sense
> > of "open source"
> 
> I don't think they agree with you there, in fact Richard would probably be most
> upset at such a claim...
May-be, may-be not.

Fact is: The GPL's notion of freedom is essentially covering freedom on
"source code". It's "viral" nature has has some implications on binaries
("make source code available to customers"), but it nowhere states that
binaries having been built from GPL'ed sources must be "free-beer".

This notion actually is the door, which opens enterprises opportunities
to ship their binaries for money. Another door, enterprises use is
bundling trademarked packages next to GPL'ed packages or to claim
restrictive copyrights on the "collection" their product consists of.