Not that I support this policy in any way, but you don't have to actually fly over the property to see it. You just have to fly higher than the fence.

Care to offer up an explanation for why police should, in fact, be able to turn off body cameras or withhold the footage from scrutiny? Or are you just messing with us?

You already used that one, just one comment up.

Is boot leather some sort of delicious treat for you?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

https://www.axios.com/2021/08/...

The excuses, blustering, and misdirection should be fun to read, at least.

Suborning perjury is a felony.

Because if there is one thing Xi Jinping concerns himself with, it's the physical well-being of his people.

From the agreement:

1.2(g):

4. Definitions:

I understand it doesn't explicitly say it is restricting rights under the GPL. The problem doesn't go away because they provide assurances elsewhere in the agreement that this is not a GPL violation - that is not operative language and, at best, provides a strong argument for ambiguity of the agreement.

The point is that this is a restriction, whether they want to call it one or not. Clients are given source, as required by the GPL, but if they redistribute it, as permitted by the GPL, they are penalized. Whether or not Red Hat has takes action over this material breach is not particularly relevant, the point is that they are claiming it exists, which gives them the contractual ability to act. I have serious doubts that this particular term, or at least their desired construction of it, would not be valid if Red Hat actually *did* attempt to cancel an agreement using this term and a client filed suit. Of course, this would be cost prohibitive for a client. It would be even more so for others with standing, such as an external developer who had contributed GPL code or an existing client seeking a declaratory judgment. This is, undoubtedly, most of what the company is counting on.

If Red Hat wants to sell an operating system and control its distribution, they are more than welcome to do so. I have heard there are other companies that have done fairly well for themselves using that strategy. They are under no particular ethical or moral obligation, in my opinion, to use the GPL for their software. However, they are using existing GPL code, which was licensed to them under particular terms. They are attempting to circumvent these terms, largely because they apparently haven't come up with a better solution to protect their service subscription business. They hoped to obfuscate the problem with a vague blog post, and now they are trying desperately to justify a ham-fisted effort to solve a technical problem with an overbroad legal solution, rather than step back and reevaluate the question. It's just unseemly.

They are contractually prohibiting their clients from distributing it. I don't really know how much clearer that needs to be made. The difference between "you aren't allowed to distribute" and "distribution of the source code will terminate this agreement" is illusory and semantic.

Leaving aside the argument about the equivalence of the source code releases, please direct me to the section of the GPL that allows a licensee to restrict source code distribution, provided they distribute it themselves elsewhere. I can't seem to locate it.

Just curious, how exactly is preventing the distribution of source code in keeping with the concept of free-as-in-speech?

There are generally two kinds of people.

Group 1 looks back on the jobs they had as teenagers or in college with some sense of perspective. They come to recognize the extent to which their desperation for work was exploited by employers quite happy to pay them borderline slave wages in exchange for withstanding constant abuse, largely arising from their inability to do an amount of work that rightfully should require three times as many employees.

Group 2, once they escape this situation, or just didn't experience it in the first place, decide that this was perfectly acceptable. Those people in those shit jobs aren't overworked and underpaid, they are just ungrateful and incompetent. They should be thrilled to be compensated at *all* for their work, and be damned thankful that their generous benefactors have chosen to allow them the honor of generating profits through their labor. Generally, Group 2, now farther up the food chain, is either on the other side of this equation now, or aspires to it. Group 2 points to the fact that some people get out of this situation, and, willfully ignoring the concept of finite resources, claims that any of these people just needs to try harder and they too will definitely climb that ladder as well.

Group 1 posts things like this:

Group 2 moderates them as 'Troll' and posts asinine shit like this in response:

Kids, don't be in Group 2. Group 2 are the reason angry mobs occasionally set lots of things on fire. Group 2 are the reason that one of those mobs got so big it ruined an entire two-continent-spanning country in the twentieth century.

tl;dr: Don't be an asshole.

Saying "this isn't bad because other people do worse things" is not a justification, it's a dodge.

The one that developed, and continues to develop, the kernel for, and much of the core software for, the OS that Red Hat is peddling - most of whom do not get an IBM paycheck. I don't even get the question.

Has he not noticed who the companies are that are doing this? Is he under the impression that SUSE hasn't *already* figured out how to make money at this? Does he believe Oracle can't afford to take advantage of this?

The FSF would certainly seem to strongly disagree, but then I am sure they just misunderstand the purpose of the license that they draft and maintain.

Another interesting bit from TFA, to drive home just how off the mark this whole thing is:

Well, RMS sure seems to think the reason was to ensure the ability to freely distribute source code, but again, I'm sure he is just misinterpreting his own motivations.

Is this some sort of late April Fool's post? This isn't some Halloween documents-era FUD propaganda, this is straight from someone who ought to know better. I fear that someone may need a cognitive exam.

IBM is banking, likely quite rightly, that no one is going to challenge them on this. They are only distributing the source to clients, with the understanding that redistribution will end their separate service agreement. I certainly would not want to be in the position of arguing that this is not a restriction on distribution under the GPL. It's bad faith at best, and complete nonsense at worst.

To paraphrase Andrew Dice Clay, RMS is rolling over in his grave, and the friggin' guy isn't even dead yet.

How did two people do this? Is there some sort of meta joke here, or is literacy just this bad?

You are wasting effort. Anyone who needs to be told this is just reading your post, and immediately attributing your naysaying to the fact you clearly do not "get" Musk, and just can't think on his "level". These folks left our reality around five or ten years ago, and haven't looked back since.

Take a Tesla to a shadetree mechanic and let us all know how that works out for you.

Now defined as "any government policy I don't like".