Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadzawistowski | Hacker News Reader

> it used to speculate that the supposed linux distro would be MIT licensed

That doesn't sound very credible of them. The kernel is stuck as GPL; that won't change anytime soon.

Distributions can have licenses. Most modern distributions are MIT licensed (meaning you can create derivative distributions under the conditions of the license). OpenSUSE is still GPLv2 and is one of the last ones (Debian switched to MIT recently IIRC).

What does that actually mean, though? It can't affect the software being distributed. Is it only the distro tools themselves?

The actual collection of software called the distribution. That's what is being licensed.

But most of that software will be licensed under other licenses, and you can't just redistribute it under another license!

If you ship a collection of software called a "distribution" that includes a copy of the Linux kernel, then that copy of the kernel remains GPL. The fact that it's on the same CD or server as some other MIT-licensed software is irrelevant.

A collective work is separate from a derived work. These are two separate things in copyright law. You can own the copyright over a library of music, despite not owning the copyright over the actual music itself. So, you could have a proprietary Linux distribution that is only made up of GPL'd software. The only thing that would be "proprietary" is the particular configuration, selection and build scripts of the packages that you picked.

So, having a GPL'd distribution means that the package sources and configurations and other such "distribution sources" have to follow the rules of the GPL. It doesn't matter what the license of the software itself is (it can even be GPL-incompatible or proprietary).

Where did you read Debian switched to MIT?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com