Is linux free 5018

I will look forward to it politely but with quiet resignation, having seen a lot of similar junk arguments from people who don't grasp the nature of all the pieces (but know how they'd like it to work out).

As have I. My analysis has been on the Web for some years:

It awaits (and needs) some redaction and correction, because of the additional consideration brought to my attention by James Sparenberg: That matter is detailed at the top of the file. (Additionally, I have recently been able to verify within reasonable certainty that, unlike RHAS 2.1, RHEL 3 & 4 have no proprietary software contents. Their only proprietary content is the two "images" SRPMs, discussed earlier.)

Here you have triggered one of my personal peeves: People use terms like "violate the GPL" and "in contradiction to the GPL" as if the GNU GPL were a statute -- and end up being, typically, unclear even in their own minds about what they actually mean. GNU GPL is, of course, a copyright-based1 licence that gets applied by copyright owners to particular instances of particular creative works they own, issued to members of the public. RH, Inc. implicitly accepts attached obligations to third-party works available under GPL terms; if it fails to meet those obligations, then it thereby commits the tort of copyright violation against the works' copyright owners (because it is then using the owners' property in an unlicensed fashion).

So, for your phrase "contradiction to the GPL" to actually mean anything, you would have to identify one or more codebase (or other creative work) that Red Hat, Inc. received under the terms of GNU GPL and then redistributed, and then show reason to believe that the "Service Agreement" you're about to point to in some way causes RH, Inc. to shirk its obligations in some specific area or other. That Service Agreement (in USA jurisdictions) is:

And here you see your first problem: These are the contractual terms for a service agreement. If the customer doesn't meet those terms, then he-she doesn't lose enbreastlement to use the software in any way whatsoever; he-she merely loses service enbreastlement.

quotations from the Service Agreement snipped

Your error lies in buttuming that what is limited is the service licensee's right to install the software. In fact, what is limited is the licensee's right to install it with a support contract. But, of course, neither GPL nor any of the other consbreastuent software's licences obliges RH, Inc. (or anyone else) to fulfill a service contract. So, RH declaring the customer to have voided his-her service enbreastlement doesn't consbreastute any sort of tort against copyright holders (what you misleadingly refer to as "infringing the GPL").

snip more of the same

Same erroneous analysis and conclusion.

Now, you might try to convince a judge that RH, Inc. had violated the copyrights of Torvalds, Cox, Miller, Stallman, et alii, if you could show that RH, Inc. had at some point had hauled a licensee into court on that sort of contract-violation tort charge and successfully got monetary damages -- on a rather thin theory that substantively RH had failed to pbutt on rights they'd promised upstream copyright holders to transmit to any recipient. Your lesser obstacle would be the complete and total lack of any such tort case.

Your bigger obstacle would be that neither GPLv2 nor any of the other copyleft licenses you might wish to cite at this point actually say anything about guaranteeing recipients the right to use software. If you read Prof. Moglen's interviews given during the early phases of the SCO cases, you'll learn that this is no accident: GPLv2 doesn't have to convey rights of use, because the right to use is not within the scope of copyright law at all. See:

According to the Wall Street Journal, an attorney for SCO, Mark Heise, said the company would contest that the users and distributors of GPL licensed software were permitted to make copies. He based this on a reading of the Copyright Act which allows licensees of computer software to make one copy for backup or archival purposes.

"It seemed to me," Moglen told us on Saturday, "the responsible thing is to ask if he'd even said such a thing." Moglen says he emailed Heise to check if he had been misquoted. Why?

"It's moonshine! The Copyright Act doesn't set limitations on what the copyright holder can do. But because you can make one copy, that doesn't mean there's no way you can make multiple copies. The wording is crystal clear. It is not an infringement."

And apparently you haven't noticed that the Service Agreement doesn't anywhere purport to abridge those rights. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I'd say your logic has holes big enough to drive a lorry through.

I await. But am not holding my breath.

I am likewise a (lapsed) mathematician. And likewise: IANAL. TINLA.

If he does, then he faces the horrendous problem that he's just alleged that all Linux distributions with old-BSD or MPLed or ASL-licensed software has been in a state of licence conflict since day one. Which is absurd.

"compilation" is a separate copyright property distinct from the components within it -- but, in the case of RH's distributions since early days, yes, they have always put a statement in the root directory that they are licensing whatever compilation property they own under GPLv2 terms.

-- Cheers, Chip Salzenberg: "Usenet is not a right." Rick Moen Edward Vielmetti: "Usenet is a right, a left, a jab, The postman hits! You have new mail."