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Second refers to binary builds of the software. Also well within the terms of the GPL.
Third refers to the Subscription Service which includes access to binary builds, access to a customer portal with knowledge base, private support tickets, etc.
None of these refer to distribution of source, which is explicitly permitted by Red Hat.
Source code contains trademarks, that is why CentOS has to remove them. If you distribute the source code you get from the RHEL subscription area you have violated your RHEL agreement.
You are not in violation of the GPL, but that is precisely my point: everybody does this, and nobody (except OP) believes it is a GPL violation.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech
This is fundamentally different from the GPL situation. Much closer is intimidation which is recognized as a criminal offense in many US states.
Secondly, "intimidation" carries a very specific legal meaning, for example here's the Montana statute [0]:
(1) A person commits the offense of intimidation when, with the purpose to cause another to perform or to omit the performance of any act, the person communicates to another, under circumstances that reasonably tend to produce a fear that it will be carried out, a threat to perform without lawful authority any of the following acts:
(a) inflict physical harm on the person threatened or any other person;
(b) subject any person to physical confinement or restraint; or
(c) commit any felony.
What we are talking about is refusing to do business with you, which is very legal. There are some exceptions, such as if the basis for that refusal is due to your race/sex, or if GRSecurity is a cartel, or if they are refusing in order to obstruct an investigation into some other illegal activity, but I'm not aware of those kinds of facts here.
I don't know about Oracle, but I know about Red Hat. They not only do not prohibit one from distributing source code and the patches they apply to it, they distribute it freely themselves, and help maintain a free distribution of RHEL called CentOS built from the same sources they use for RHEL.
There is no reasonable way to compare Red Hat's policies about source distribution and availability to grsecurity.
Of course they prohibit it. e.g. from [1]
> This EULA does not permit you to distribute the Programs or their components using Red Hat's trademarks, regardless of whether the copy has been modified. You may make a commercial redistribution of the Programs only if (a) permitted under a separate written agreement with Red Hat authorizing such commercial redistribution, or (b) you remove and replace all occurrences of Red Hat trademarks.
from [2]
> Distributing the Software and Services (or any portion) to a third party outside the Portal or using the Software and/or Services to support a third party without paying for each Instance is a material breach of this Agreement even though the open source license applicable to individual software packages may give you the right to distribute those packages
from [3]
> Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement, such as... (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software
[1] https://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/licenses/GLOBAL_EULA_RHEL_Engli...
[2] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/cloud_CSSA/Red_Hat_Cloud_Sof...
[3] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/GLOBAL_Appendix_one_English_...
"Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License."
The question of law is if threatening recipients who exercise their rights qualifies as a restriction on them exercising their rights. Thinking that it does is not a fundamental misunderstanding of the text.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the law, and it is not (an open) question of law.
In the US for example, you have the right to free speech. But except in very unusual circumstances, your employer can fire you for exercising it. Whether that threat is a restriction on your rights is perhaps a question in philosophy or ethics, but from a legal point of view it's very clear: your employer is not restricting your speech, they are restricting their own hiring policy.
So it is here. Legally speaking, you are not restricted from redistributing the software. You may be restricted from GRSecurity wanting to do business with you afterwards but you don't have a right to be someone's customer under the GPL, you only have the right to corresponding binaries.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the GPL. The GPL merely requires corresponding source to be made available alongside binaries, so if you get a binary from someone you have a right to the corresponding source from that person. It does not require anyone to offer you a binary; it merely says if they did, you can get the corresponding source.
GRSecurity has no obligation to provide you a binary, they can decline to offer you one because you have a silly walk or a 13-character username or you exercised your rights under the GPL. The GPL does not entitle you to product updates or to continue to be a customer of someone who doesn't want you as a customer, it merely entitles you to corresponding source for binaries.
Some would say GRSecurity's practice violates the spirit of the GPL, but the GPL is not a spiritual entity, it's a legal document, and if you want a legal document that produces a different outcome you can write one up.
Also, you should read the fine print from any other Linux vendor – RHEL, Oracle, etc. You don't have to go on "my understanding from several reliable sources", the documents actually state they'll terminate you as a customer if you redistribute their stuff.
The amazing resistance of the field to such obvious claims (the more successful part of what's called behavioural economics) gives many of us looking in from the outside pause.
It was not until the 1970s and the Lucasian rationalist critique that microfoundations became an important inquiry. And that shift didn't occur because people were sentimentally attached to micro (if anything, they were attached to prevailing macro theories), it happened because Lucasian rationalism explained an empirical phenomenon (a shift in the Phillips curve) that was not explained by the other approaches. Since that time support for microfoundations has waxed and waned a few times, in response to several other empirical shifts.
In practice, economics is much like the other sciences, with a slightly wider diversity of thought. Like the other sciences, most people only understand a caricature of it that is given through the lens of politics. Unlike the other sciences, more people seem inclined to accept this caricature and criticize it on that basis, which is unfortunate.
[1] Everyone, but see https://www.jstor.org/stable/2231707?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... for a plausibly-readable overview
"letʼs start hacking, letʼs start building something, letʼs see where it goes pulling on the string" feels scarily accurate, and it's unclear where the language will be in 5 years.
Among other things, there's no way to disable objective-c interop, even though it complicates the language and feels like someone merged smalltalk, C++, and ML—not a pretty combination. But—literally the only reason you'd enable that would be to work with Cocoa/UIKit.
I'm still out on ARC—it was much less of a problem than I expected on my last project, but it never feels like an optimal solution, and you can never just "forget about it for the first draft" the way you can a VM's GC.
Believe it or not, this compiler option is named `-disable-objc-interop`.
> Could someone explain why I should build a language developed entirely by and for writing Apple ecosystem products?
Possibly because you have an affinity for value types, performance, or safety. A language is a lot more than just a checkbox of platforms it supports, although iOS is a pretty large checkbox right now.
> the long list of benefits suddenly looks much, much smaller compared to e.g. JVM, .NET, Go, etc etc.
Swift isn't trying to compete with any of those. I mean sure in the "world domination 10 year plan" sense, but for the forseeable future the bullets that make Java attractive to enterprises (lots of developers, lots of libraries, lots of platforms) are not on anyone's todo list in the Swift community.
Rather, the short-term goal is to compete with C/C++/Rust. So you are writing a web server (e.g. nginx alternative, not a webapp) or a TLS stack or an h264 decoder and buffer overflows on the internet sounds scary, you are doing pro audio plugins where 10ms playback buffer is the difference between "works" and "the audio pops", you need to write an array out to network in a single pass to place your buy order before the trader across the street from you, but still have a reasonably productive way to iterate your trading algorithm because Trump is elected, etc.
As far as JVM/.NET, a cardinal rule of software is that it bloats over time. So JVM/.NET/Go can never "scale down" to the kinds of things C/C++ developers do, but it is less known whether a low-level language can "bloat up" to do what .NET developers do. In fact, C++ kinda does "bloat up", because C++ .NET exists. But that is basically an accident, because C++ was not designed in the 80s with .NET developers in mind, and perhaps for that reason it is not the most popular .NET. To the extent we have a plan, the plan with Swift is to try that "on purpose this time" and see if it works better when we're designing it to do that rather than grabbing a round peg off the shelf and hammering it into our square hole. It probably won't ever be as good at .NET problems as .NET, but perhaps it can get close, for useful values of close.
> you can never just "forget about it for the first draft" the way you can a VM's GC.
Similarly, ARC does not exist to compete with your VM on ease-of-use, it competes with malloc/free on ease of use (and your VM on performance). If your VM is performant enough (or you can afford the hardware to make it so), great, but that just isn't the case for many programming domains, and that's the issue we're addressing.
There is also a quasi-non-performance aspect to ARC that is often overlooked: deterministic deallocation. Most VM memory models are unbounded in that resources never have to be deallocated, but in a system like ARC we have fairly tight guarantees on when deallocation will take place. So if your objects have handles to finite resources in some way (think like open file handles, sockets, something to clean up when they blow away) the natural Swift solution will be much more conservative with the resource use relative to the natural JVM solution. Because of that it may be more useful to think of ARC as a general-purpose resource minimization scheme (where memory is merely one kind of resource) rather than as a memory model or GC alternative itself.
Red Hat places branding in their own packages, generally, which is easily replaced by distributions...they do their own re-branding in Fedora and CentOS; the trademarks are built to be removable. Red Hat went out of their way to make it easier to build a from-source RHEL without violating trademarks, despite not really having a legal obligation to do so.
My assertion was that Red Hat customers make agreements with Red Hat in which they agree not to redistribute RHEL. That is directly analogous to the GRSecurity case, except there we are relying on something OP heard thirdhand and in the case of RH we can read the agreements.