Leslie Satenstein via devel wrote:
What should I do, if the person I gave the software to, removes my
copyright, rebrands the software and sells my software as their own? Is it
right? And when I release a bug fix, they take it, insert the fix into the
rebranded copy they are selling, and they quietly say, "Screw You,
Leslie".
Removing the copyright is not allowed under the GPL, and in many
jurisdictions your license cannot even allow that to begin with, but that is
not what is being done by the rebuilds, so that point is a strawman.
The rest is just how Free Software works and should work.
Suppose I was the government, and I did that same offer to
end-users.
Would the redistribution be legit, and even honest, if from the
government, and it was for remuneration?
Same answer as above.
What right does a company have the right to clone and rebrand my
product
and resell it?
That is an essential part of Free Software, of Open Source, and of the GPL
in particular.
Under the gpl3, they have an unenforceable obligation to
provide me with bug reports.
They actually have no such obligation, enforceable or not.
They do not have a moral right to redistribute my software as their
own,
and for remuneration.
That is your very personal interpretation and does not match the Free
Software definition nor the Open Source definition.
In two cases, at least two companies offer Linux as known Red Hat,
clones.
We understand that they copy the sources, the bug fixes, and rebrand the
software as their own. In most cases, vanilla in -- vanilla out. But it is
not revenue in, revenue shared.
Guess what, Free Software means this is perfectly acceptable behavior,
whether you find it fair or not. Life is not fair.
What should Red Hat do to recover the costs for development of new
features, documentation, distribution, bug-fixes, 24/7 support as well,
the infrastructure that allowed an individual to freely download the
entire package. The clones have none of those obligations or costs? Red
Hat is financing Centos and Fedora. Moreover, visit
https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/
to get a small idea of the investment, operating costs, and end-user
benefits. Recall, Red Hat shareholders are not a government body.
The clones also have infrastructure costs.
They indeed do not share the development costs, but there is no requirement
that they do.
Perhaps it is time to provide a gpl4 rule that encompasses or
replaces
gpl3.
A "GPL4" with the kind of rules you imply would no longer be Free Software,
hence I hope the FSF will never put this kind of terms into any version of
the GPL.
Kevin Kofler