GRsecurity is preventing others from employing their rights under version 2 the GPL to redistribute source code.

[Xen]

concernedfossdev at teknik.io schreef op 31-05-2016 5:19:

> GRsecurity is preventing others from employing their rights under
> version 2 the GPL to redistribute
> (by threatening them with a non-renewal of a contract to recive this
> patch to the linux kernel.)
> (GRsecurity is a derivative work of the linux kernel (it is a patch)).

Apparently they can choose whom to distribute to in the first place; GPL 
does not require that you distribute to anyone, only that you must make 
corresponding source available when you do.

So even though you may have the source (and binaries, I guess) and you 
have the rights under copyright to distribute it further, /as per the 
copyright license/ that only applies to something that has already been 
distributed to you. It says nothing about the requirement for the 
original distributor (in this case grsecurity) to keep distributing to 
you after.

I would say the GPL is not really completely in line with personal and 
real interests, so it might not be weird to consider that commercial 
vendors would have an issue with it.

Still this person is not violating GPL. He may be petty but many 
developers are (and I am too). Regardless, it seems this is his "next 
best" solution to place an effective copyright restriction without using 
copyright for it.

You cannot have rights to source code you never obtained, after all. 
People will do this thing as long as proprietariness is illegal, and you 
can't change humans either to put a stop to that.