Re: Fedora and the System Administrator

[Federico Sacerdoti <fds sdsc edu>]

On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 06:23 AM, Bill Anderson wrote:

> -> Download the SRPMS[1]
>
> [1] Funny (in a good way) thing, RH goes *beyond* the GPL requirements
> by making these available. Outside of stripping those, there is no
> getting around needing to pay a license fee for those bits.

What percentage of the RPM spec files are GPL'd? As I understand it, a 
SRPM is:

1. Source tarball
2. Patches
3. Spec file.

Of course 1, 2 must be disclosed publicly by the legal definition of 
GPL. The spec file is interesting, if it was derived from one provided 
by the package authors (not redhat) then it must be dislosed. If it was 
originally GPL'd by redhat in an earlier release, and a derivation is 
used in the current RHEL product, it must be disclosed (you cant un-GPL 
your software). There may be some other cases with a different outcome.



Federico

Rocks Cluster Group, San Diego Supercomputing Center, CA