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Novell might infringe the GPL

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SUSE

SFLC's Practical Guide to GPL Compliance is a long document, and a must-read for any maintainer of a GPL'ed project.

Here's what I spotted of interest in it, at a glance, somewhere under 4.1.2:

«Second, note that the last line makes the offer valid to anyone who requests the source. This is because v2 § 3(Cool requires that offers be “to give any third party” a copy of the Corresponding Source. GPLv3 has a similar requirement, stating that an offer must be valid for “anyone who possesses the object code”. These requirements indicated in v2 § 3(c) and v3 § 6(c) are so that non-commercial redistributors may pass these offers along with their distributions. Therefore, the offers must be valid not only to your customers, but also to anyone who received a copy of the binaries from them. Many distributors overlook this requirement and assume that they are only required to fulfill a request from their direct customers.»

The issue I am trying to clarify is the following one:

> Red Hat makes publicly available to anyone, in free access (here), the complete source code for all the packages included in RHEL, including the sources for the commercially-available updates (through RHN)! Once again: the sources for all the updated packages are available to anyone.

> Novell only makes publicly available to anyone, in free access (here and here), only the source code for the packages "as of release", e.g. as on the physical media for SLED 10 SP2, for instance! There is no way to get the sources for the updated packages, unless you're a customer!

Is this GPL-compliant? IANAL, but based on the GPL Compliance Guide, it looks like it's not.




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