Quote:

Part of Section 1 of the GPL

You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

Section 2.b of the GPL

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

end of quote:

Now for sure IANAL, however how I read this is that a company can charge for distributing its patches. However once received, the patch is covered by the GPL and can then be freely redistributed and/or incorporated into the vanilla distribution of any package.

The net effect would be customers paying for the patch incorporated into the distribution that they have brought, and the rest downloading it from wherever they want. This may work as a business model in which you provide fast distribution patches for cost, but it still cannot be used to close off those patches from the rest of the community.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/200/23969#23969