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>Since free software is so pervasive these days, it might not be very hard to find something within a company's product portfolio that depends greatly on free or open source software. Once discovered, all it takes is a claim of license violation like this one to shut down that software

That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when modified and distributed/sold.



> That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when modified and distributed/sold.

No, you have to comply with the GPL regardless of whether you've modified the source that you're distributing. (As in this case: I'd be surprised if Twin Peaks modified mount -- I don't see why they'd need to.)


They are a file system vendor, they probably added some mount options for their file system to mount.


If I remember correctly, each file system has its own mount.fsname command, the mount command itself just routes to those individual commands (based on the -t argument). You could surely add tools for a filesystem without modifying the general mount tool itself.


Ah yes you are right. So presumably they copied one of the other ones as a template. Its not much code and easy to rectify then.


Unfortunately, all shipped products already willingly violated RH's copyright. Doesn't look too good.


You completely missed the point.

There's a lot of open source code that isn't GPL. Many licenses don't require the code to be distributed, even if it's changed.

The sentence from the article makes it sound like all open source code is GPL.


Yes, but the poster 'recoiledsnake' made a separate mistake, stating that modification to GPL code is required for it to be vulnerable to lawsuits. As cjbprime stated, that isn't true; using the code is enough for it to be covered.


Distribution not use is required for the GPL to restrict you. But you are right that modification is irrelevant.


thanks, funny that I also made a mistake




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