Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752696AbaACS5Y (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Jan 2014 13:57:24 -0500 Received: from plane.gmane.org ([80.91.229.3]:54032 "EHLO plane.gmane.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751359AbaACS5X (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Jan 2014 13:57:23 -0500 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: Eric Appleman Subject: Re: GPL violators (charging for a Linux kernel by itself and then charging again for source) Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2014 18:56:58 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: sea.gmane.org User-Agent: Loom/3.14 (http://gmane.org/) X-Loom-IP: 68.194.217.253 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.5 Safari/537.36) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1797 Lines: 33 https://plus.google.com/115556873499158641618/posts/VfAcAdUHU6h Mirror in case of deletion: http://pastebin.com/7fXKR6ss A small snippet... "Chad can sell his kernel, and he has the right to refuse to sell it to specific people he if sees fit. Chad can charge for the source code. so as long as the price of the source code does NOT exceed the cost of the kernel itself. There is NO limit to what Chad can charge for the kernel. Source needs to be made available only to "users of the software" and only if "requested" by the "user of the software" - and yes, as stated above, a fee can be charged for access to the electronic download of source, as long as it is no more than the cost of the kernel. Yes, people who "buy" the kernel can share it with who they want with or without a charge, but Chad still has the right to charge for source if the "3rd party" requests source." I'm curious to know if there is a single maintainer or contributor on this list who finds such behavior acceptable. Wasn't the whole idea of a fee being permitted an acknowledgment that physical distribution of source was acceptable if electronic was not possible (low bandwidth ISP, security concerns, etc). I don't have a problem with people charging for GPL software, you can do that. But usually the money goes towards supporting the user or covering the costs of hardware it's shipped on. All I see is a profit-driven scheme that effectively charges for a Linux kernel that you all made together and Chad represents less than 0.001% of. - Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/