Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 19, 2008, Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> > The GPL then violates #9 in the definition

>> > 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

>> It doesn't, really.  It applies to a program, and to other works
>> derived from the program.  It doesn't apply to works that are
>> merely aggregated in the same distribution medium, without forming
>> a single program under copyright law.

> Then how could the fork of cdrecords had to be created if it was not
> Restrict Other Software?

AFAICT the issue has nothing to do with other software, but rather
about software under incompatible licenses being part of the same
program.

Now, I don't have all the details, but it appears to me that, if it's
all code whose copyright is held solely by Jörg Schilling (I don't
know that he is), he's legally entitled to license each piece under
whatever licenses he likes, and he won't be infringing anyone's
copyrights, because he holds all copyrights involved.

Now, anyone else who'd like to modify or distribute the programs and
libraries in the package he releases would have to comply with the
licensing conditions he chose for each entire program.

As it turns out, it appears that the conditions are contradictory:
while they grant permissions for the individual components, some of
the programs in there, taken as a whole (i.e., containing code under
GPL and code under CDDL, including code from libraries the program
contains), could only be distributed in violation of both licenses, so
it couldn't be legally distributed.

I can see why Debian (and anyone else) would object to distributing
code under these conditions :-)

Now, IANAL and I haven't looked into the details, I draw my
conclusions from the links you posted.


Anyhow, even if this is not the exact situation, it appears that there
may have been another component to the decision to fork.  Other issues
than licensing are clearly visible in the discussion threads about the
original package and GNU/Linux distributions.  This alone might have
been enough to justify a fork, and the licensing change may have very
well been just the event that got the trigger pulled.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}