[lug] Redhat Enterprise Linux

[Jeffrey Siegal]

Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
>>1. Red Hat claims a compilation copyright on the distribution as a
>>whole.  A compilation is not a derivative work, and the GPL's mere
>>aggregation clause applies, so the GPL doesn't necessarily apply to the
>>distribution *itself*, just the component packages.  You can pull
>>individual packages from RHEL and copy/install them on as many systems
>>as you want, but copying too many of them together would violate the
>>compilation copyright.
> 
> 
> This almost makes sense.  I can copy any single rpm off the disk, but not 
> use it to do a fresh install.  That might hold up.
> 
> I kinda doubt that RH means that, however.  They've been very good about 
> issueing all their code under the GPL.  The only thing I know that they 
> haven't released under GPL is thr RH Network update software, but they 
> don't distribute it, either.

All the *code*, yes, but not the distribution itself.  I don't think 
you'll find anything that Red Hat has said or distributed that 
explicitly puts the RHEL distributions under the GPL.