GPL compliance

[Daniel Carrera]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 10:00 -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> If Daniel doesn't have Red Hat's permission (AKA license) to the
> copyrights that Red Hat owns for parts of the Linux kernel, then
> Daniel may not legally (re)publish it as he is planning to do.

You still haven't gotten your head around the concept of re-licensing
and the GPL? For someone who professes to understand copyright law as
much as you do, you really haven't grasped the basics of the GPL. If Red
Hat gives Linus a patch under the GPL, Linus can redistribute it (ie.
re-license) under the GPL. Canonical then gets it under the GPL, and
gives it to me under the GPL (ie. re-licenses it). And once again, I can
give it to someone else under the GPL (ie. re-license it again).
Canonical doesn't need to get a separate permission from Red Hat, and
neither do I, because we both got it from someone who had permission to
redistribute it under the GPL.

Redistribution is the cornerstone of free software. It would be worth
learning about it.


> The text of the GPL used by Red Hat for the GPL'd IP in
> question give terms and conditions for getting and keeping that
> permission.

The GPL does not have any entry on how to "get" permission. The GPL *is*
permission to redistribute and re-license; which means that Canonical
and I don't need to contact RH or even actually get the binary from RH
at all. All that we need is to get it from someone who has permission to
re-license that binary to us (e.g. Linus Tovalds).


> Repeat for all other GPL-using owners and similarly for owners who use
> other licenses like X's.  Of course, nobody has the time to actually
> do all of this.

Nobody has the *need* to do all of this. There is no legal requirement
to contact the original IP owners because those IP owners gave other
people the right to re-license their work. I'd think you would have
gotten your head around the concept of relicensing by now.


> They take (minor) legal risks and hope nobody will
> care -- a very good bet.

Not contacting the original IP owners is *not* a legal risk. I have no
legal requirement to contact Red Hat. All I need is to get a license
from someone who has a license that allows re-licensing. In this case,
that is Canonical. This is not an "I probably won't get sued" attitude.
Re-licensing is perfectly legal because RH gave their code under a
license that permits re-licensing. Geez!

Daniel.
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