https://twitter.com/jonoberheide/status/857243764800225280 … It will still be GPLv2 since customers are paying for sources licensed as GPLv2. Legally, they could publish it.
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They can decide not to accept the payment next month and stop providing access to the patches without explicitly stating the reason.
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A company doesn't need to keep doing business with you. Even if it's explicitly stated why it's happening, it's hard to see a legal issue.
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It's rather scary that ppl working w/ GPL sw like yourself see "selecting only customers who silently agree to waive GPL rights" as legal...
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Attempting to circumvent the intent/spirit of the GPL is not going to be looked upon kindly by FOSS communities or by the courts.
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There are no rights being waived. The GPL doesn't say anything about entitlement to future versions of the software. Would not make sense.
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The spirit of the GPL is about user freedom, not publishing code or contributing back. They aren't what the FSF cares about or tried to do.
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And all of those freedoms are intact. Future business relationship with the company producing the software is not one of the those freedoms.
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Forget about future vers; it's a distraction. If they said "if you exercise your rights under GPL, we'll kill a kitten" it'd infringe too.
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Also how are their customers supposed to do anything useful with it without publishing the source? Just use it internally?
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If they have any third-party users/customers of their own they ship to, they're required to ship or offer the full source.
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Sure, which is why it will primarily only be for internal use on servers or internal client devices. The patch can also be stripped down.
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They are likely going to be offer discounts for patches supporting only a single architecture, but could do a lot more if they wanted to.
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In theory, they could have a company provide their kernel configuration and then generate a stripped down patch for them based on that.
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Remove changes in all the unused files and add
#error to those to avoid any potential mistakes. They probably won't do that, but they could. -
A company might just be expected to pay a lot more and use less widely applicable patches to use it for clients outside of the company.
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It's also quite possible that their clients never request sources, especially if they aren't aware that they're using grsecurity kernels.
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Given that this is also the business model for RHEL, yes, very interesting!
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I've also seen multiple people make this claim (maybe c&p'd from HN or something?) and as far as I can tell it's nonsense.
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I don't read HN. I could just be confused.
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OK, just a guess - surprising that I'd seen that same (seemingly wrong) example from multiple ppl arguing about grsec.
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Red Hat will terminate your support agreement if you publish stuff, IIRC.
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Still have access to the public sources, but they intentionally obfuscate stuff by applying all the patches and giving tarballs of result.
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