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Looks like bing chat is programmed to insist that RedHat RHEL is not violating the GPL…
(lemmy.world)
I admit I know nothing about what programs RedHat has contributed to, or what their plans are. I am only familiar with the GPL in general (I use arch, btw). So I tried to have Bing introduce me to the situation. The conversation got weird and maybe manipulative by Bing.
Can you explain to me why Bing is right and I am wrong?
It sounds like a brazen GPL violation. And if RedHat is allowed to deny a core feature of the GPL, the ability to redistribute, it will completely destroy the ability of any author to specify any license other than MIT. Perhaps Microsoft has that goal and forced Bing to support it.
Bing Chat is wrong. RHEL customers are legally allowed to share the code. What Red Had can do, and that has nothing to do with the GPL, is to end the contract with the customer who shared the code, thereby according to the GPL the customer also no longer has any right to access the code. The GPL only applies to software distribution, not contracts outside copyright law.
Edit: Red Hat is under no obligation to share non-copyleft code of which there is plenty in a Linux distribution but they do. Just look at Apple: Take plenty of FOSS code, give back only a fraction. It sucks but it's legal. That's also why Apple moved away from GPL software – can't even bothered to ship BASH with macOS.
Yes. I just don’t know if it’s good to phrase it as “RHEL customers are legally allowed to share the code”, since as soon as they do it they won’t be allowed to be customers anymore lol (assuming Red Hat finds out)
It's not good to phrase it the way Bing Chat does and claim that it's illegal either.
Btw, I find it funny how short the memory of many users is. Canonical claims copyright for all compiled binaries of non-GPL code (this includes OpenSSL, Xorg, and Wayland, among many others): https://ubuntu.com/legal/intellectual-property-policy ("Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries.")
Oh, I actually didn’t know about this! To be fair, I haven’t touched Ubuntu since I was like 14 (yeah, I have weird hobbies).
That's the reason why Canonical forced out the Kubuntu maintainers who then went on to create KDE Neon. The IP Policy originally did not contain the sentence "This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu" which means that GPL'ed binaries were also covered by that and the Kubuntu maintainers openly said that this is illegal.
This created so much backlash to Canonical, they did not dare to actually enforce the policy but the policy is still there. So all the Mints, pop_OSes, etc. of the world who distribute unmodified Ubuntu binary packages of BSD/MIT-licensed code are technically in breach of Canonical's IP Policy.
Then why isn’t Canonical taking action against those distros?
Maybe they have their hands full in making enemies by pushing Snaps. 🤣