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by lokedhs 3271 days ago
But that's not what they're saying. If you read their statements on the subject you'll see that they explicitly permit redistribution under the rules of the GPL.

What they will do is terminate your contract and you will not receive further updates.

There GPL does not mandate that you receive updates to anything. All it says is is that no restrictions can be applied on the source code that you have received.

1 comments

>But that's not what they're saying.

Let's back up for a moment just to make sure we're talking about the same "they." "They" being the author of this article, absolutely said almost verbatim what I claimed they said.

My post: "It is correctly claiming that the GPLv2 license prohibits one from adding additional restrictions to the redistribution of the source code"

The article: "This is tantamount to the addition of a term to the GPL prohibiting distribution or creating a penalty for distribution. GPL section 6 specifically prohibits any addition of terms."

>If you read their statements on the subject you'll see that they explicitly permit redistribution under the rules of the GPL.

Now it seems you're talking about GRsec and not the author of the article, but I definitely didn't claim GRsec said anything, I only made assertions about what the article said.

Then, going a step further, what you're arguing is yet another separate issue entirely, which is more relevant but still different than anything in this thread: Your claim is that their contract's rules of punishing someone for redistribution is not covered by GPL section 6. This may well be true, but I would personally guess not.

"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein" seems pretty clear cut to me. It implies that you can't impose any further restrictions. You can't even write a contract regarding the terms of redistributing GPLv2 software. And indeed, as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no precedence for being able to do that. If you could do that, then anyone could defeat the GPL by making a contract with sufficient punishment for redistribution.

The word "they" in my previous post was referring to grsec.