[Rule-list] Thoughts on licensing

[Martin Stricker]

Marco Fioretti wrote:

> 1) miniconda: if it comes from anaconda, which is, IIRC, GPL, can't it
>    be GPL only? I mean, do we have any room to manoeuver here?

Yes, exactly. That's the nice thing about GPL, no one can put his/her
derivate work into any other, maybe proprietary, license. BSD does allow
that, and therefore I do not like BSD-style licenses.

> 2) Same as above about slinky: where does it come from, license-wise?

Since syslinux is published under a BSD license slinky must also include
the BSD license text, not only the GPL text! We have to honor all the
licenses we use!

The installed packages have their licenses with them, usually put into
/usr/share/doc/<packagename>/ . We do not need to care about these
licenses because RULE does not *use* them. They just have to be
redistributable, which is true for all packages in the freely
downloadable Red Hat Linux CDs (but *not* the applications CDs you
cannot download!). The user is responsible for obeying to the licenses
of the packages (s)he installs.

> 3) There is one thing I have pretty strong feelings about, and is to
>    not make anything that will prevent Red Hat to merge (at least) the
>    installer in their official product some day.

Since miniconda is pure GPL, and slinky is GPL/LGPL/BSD I don't see any
problems. The sole BSD software in slinky, syslinux, is used to boot the
official Red Hat Linux CDs/floppies, too.

Best regards,
Martin Stricker
-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Red Hat Linux 7.2 for low memory: http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/rule/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/

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