• 5 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle




  • Does the GPL cover having to give redistribution rights to the exact same code used to replicate a certain build of a product?

    It does, and very explicitly and intentionally. What it doesn’t say is that you have to make that source code available publically, just that you have to make it available to those you give or sell the binary to.

    What Red Hat is doing is saying you have the full right to the code, and you have the right to redistribute the code. However, if you exercise that right, we’ll pull your license to our binaries and you lose access to code fixes.

    That’s probably legal under the GPL, though smarter people than me are arguing it isn’t. However, if those writing GPLv2 had thought of this type of attack at the time, I suspect it wouldn’t be legal under the GPL.


  • I believe you are correct. Any paying Red Hat customer consuming GPL code has the right to redistribute that code. What Red Hat seems to be suggesting is that if you exercise that right, they’ll cut you as a customer, and thus you no longer have access to bug fixes going forward.

    I suspect it’s legal under the GPL. I’m certain it violates the spirit of the GPL.


  • I am not a lawyer, but I have been a follower of FLOSS projects for a long time.

    Me too. I know what I’m suggesting is functionally impossible. I’m wondering if it could be done in compliance with the GPL.

    All of those contributors have done so using language that says GPLv2 or higher. Specifically says you can modify or redistribute under GPLv2 or later versions. So nothing stops the Linux Foundation from asking new contributors to contribute under the GPLv4 and then releasing the combined work of the new kernel under GPLv4.

    The old code would still be available under the GPLv2, but I suspect subsequent releases could be released under a later version and still comply with original contributions.

    Again, I know it won’t happen, just like I believe Red Hat’s behavior is within the rules of the GPL. I’d love to hear arguments as to how Red Hat is violating the GPL or reasons why the kernel couldn’t be released under GPLv3 or higher.



  • Upvotes and downvotes.

    Right now, I can browse by New on my subscribed communities and see every post since the last time I did that.

    I can view or re-view posts and read every response. If the responses are legion, I can play with hot/top and get the meat of the discussion.

    Did you notice that last sentence? On the few posts where there are too many responses to view all, I’ll try to get at those that are relevant.

    If the Lemmy community grows large enough, I’ll need to do the same for posts. I will no longer be able to regularly view by new and have time to see everything.

    So, I’ll need to rely on some sorting method to make certain I see relevant stuff.

    Someone with millions of bots that never post have millions of upvotes and downvotes to influence the score used by the sorting algorithm that I’ll use to decide what to read.
















  • I’m also curious about how it works with a mix of subscribed communities. When I sort my subscribed comments, Hot seems similar (identical?) to New. Active does give me interesting stuff, but hides things I’d be interested in from smaller communities.

    I’d like a mix that gives me those more popular posts I’m interested in, but also gives me the less active posts from smaller communities.

    You’d need some way of calculating a scaled score of each post in each separate community, then providing a method of sorting all posts using that scaled score. That is, some way to realize a post in a 100 member community with 25 upvotes and 200 comments may be more relevant in a subscriber list compared to a post with 200 upvotes and 100 comments in a community of 10,000.

    Of course, I’m not sure I’d want the same scoring mechanism used in all as opposed to subscribed. I want to see the niche but interesting stuff in my subscribed communities. I’m not sure I want that when looking at all, or at least not to the same extent.