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On Thu, 2008-03-20 at 08:15 +0000, Ray Smith wrote: > I agree. I remember reading an interview LF did with SuSE about their > commitment to keeping their version of Linux going no matter what > happened to or who took over the company. > They have some clause that says a free version will always b available > which led to opensuse. You don't need a clause. The GPL specifically requires that this is always possible. The only things that can be a problem are things that are not linked against the GPL'd code - things like branding, icon sets, maybe one or two specific config routines that are only linked against the LGPL. (Which is another reason not to use the LGPL or BSD licences). The issue is that the GPL does not cover the infrastructure of the project itself. > I thought that was the same reason Redhat became Fedora. In effect, but the clause you are thinking of is the GPL itself. Read the details of a similar fork here: http://femm.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/ > Both are community versions that although using software from Suse/RH > etc can carry on independently True. Any collection of GPL/LGPL/BSD (i.e. DFSG compliant) software can be perpetually forked by anyone who fancies doing the work. No permission is needed, there is no way of anyone stopping the fork from happening (as long as trademarks are respected) and there is nothing that the parent company can do about it. RH, SuSE and others know all this so they "adopt" the community version just to make life easy. The community version will and would have existed anyway, with or without the sponsoring - it would just have not had the infrastructure support (mirrors, websites, mailing lists, IRC etc.). *THAT* is what could disappear from underneath Fedora or OpenSuSE. It would cause a fair scramble for web resources and quite a bit of chaos but I'm sure the community could sort it out. It is simply a matter of desire from the community - if the will is there to sustain it, it will be sorted. After all, if the community migrates to something else, the distro would die anyway - no matter what the company wants. *BSD and Debian have an independent infrastructure that is not beholden to anyone - it is all sponsored or donated. It means that there is no threat of removing all the infrastructure in one disastrous email exchange. The vendor independence just means that the people within the group have the freedom to choose how the distribution will be managed and packaged. Ironically, it is precisely the issue with iceweasel that indicates the vendor independence benefits - Mozilla was trying to dicate to Debian how Debian software had to be managed via trademarks and Debian simply said "no" in a collected voice. (i.e. there were debates within Debian about how to respond and the consensus was a firm rebuttal.) Currently, there could be questions of whether Fedora or OpenSuSE would ever say the same thing to a third-party company that had some kind of contract with RedHat/SuSE. Yes, Fedora could drop RH but the chaos that would ensue means that such a step will not be taken lightly or without a great deal of preparation. In effect, Debian have already made the leap. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html