Restriction on distribution by Novell?

Matthew Flaschen superm40 at comcast.net
Wed Sep 27 01:03:36 UTC 2006


Ben Tilly wrote:
> It certainly violates the intent of the license.  But I think it might
> not violate the text of the license.  If so, that would be a bug in
> the license. :-)

I suppose that's possible.  It would be a very serious bug, as it 
directly contradicts the FSF's first freedom (freedom to modify).

> If the company pushes
> this in a truly annoying way, eventually some customer will demand
> source and republish it.  So what motivation would a company have to
> generate negative publicity by being annoying this way?

It's probably not a real problem, but it's possible that no customer 
would want to jeopardize their support contract by requesting source. 
They might be willing to give a copy of their written offer to someone 
else in this case.

Matt Flaschen




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