Re: [PLUG] CentOS

On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 11:31 AM Dustin Black via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 12:45 AM Joe Rosato <rosatoj@gmail.com> wrote:

[KSB] <…snip…>

3. And since linux is licenced under gpl 2.0, where you are allowed to make $$ off it - provided you don't make proprietary changes and then NOT release them back to the community... Can there be problems in the future as they pull away from the community?

Ah, and here we find the fully unveiled loaded question. ;)

[KSB] This discussion highlights one of the common misperceptions of FOSS licensing (at least copyleft licensing). If you start with software made available to you under a copyleft license and make changes to it, you are not obliged to make your changes available upstream, i.e., to the user, community or organization from whom you got the code you started with. However, if you make changes to it, and provide a binary to someone else, you are obliged to offer your source code changes to that downstream user of your software.

Copyleft licenses provide users rights over developers, not the other way around. It is often a characteristic of proprietary software licenses that if you make some changes to software (assuming you have access to the source code), then you must provide those changes back upstream. This is a shift of power upstream, and the opposite of FOSS licenses that shift power downstream.

Neither Red Hat nor any other developer or enhancer of copyleft software has any obligation to provide their changes back to the community. That most choose to do so is because it is good for business, including in the extended sense that goodwill can be good for business.

Regards

– Bhaskar

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