I commented to the blog, saying that it was incomplete to say "Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL." The blog responded, it's submitted for moderation - but I do not see my, or any other comments.<p>A simple search on "Linux GPL-2 license" yields "The Linux Kernel is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only", and on the gnu site, "Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code [...or...] give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code". For brevity, I synopsized this in my comment.<p>I see too many articles saying that Red Hat only have to provide source code to its customers - and the blog only implies that - but the Linux license requires more. The community often takes the source code, compiles and matches the binaries. That is essential. Red Hat offers a service, support and warranty, but as the license says, you cannot just take the source code, you have to give it back too.<p>I had a contract where source code had been lost, until I found a printout, yellowed and wrinkled, showing self-modifying code to boot, and assembled that, finding a match to the binary, at which point I could produce a module that could be maintained in the future. That task would have been much more difficult without source code.
> I am 73 years old, and have spent more than 50 years in “the community”.<p>Indeed Mr Hall's efforts helped make the community happen. I'm kinda surprised to see this slide by without more attention.