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Jeremy Allison Resigns From Novell In Protest
walterbyrd writes to alert us to word from groklaw.net that Jeremy Allison has turned in his resignation at Novell. "The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls 'a mistake' that will be 'damaging to Novell's success in the future.' His main issue with the deal, though, is 'that even if it does not violate the letter of the license, it violates the intent of the GPL license the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.' He leaves the company at the end of this month. He explained why in a message sent to several Novell email lists, and the message included his letter to management."
samba is moving to GPL 3 as soon as they can, so Novell will need to change the deal or fork.
You must provide access to the source code to the person to whom you delivered your derived work. Nothing in the GPL says that you need to provide access to the public.
You are correct that the genius is that distributing something that was under the GPL must be distributed under the GPL itself. Recursive genius, though some fudslingers call it viral genius.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.