The FSF's being stupid again, it seems...

[Natanael Copa]

On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 18:05 -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
> rob wrote:
>  > What's important to me is that people can _get_ the source code to reproduce
>  > the binary they've got.  (Nobody's letting anyone off the hook for that.  It
>  > must be available.)  And it can be tricky to make sure you've got the _right_
>  > source code,
> 
> not really so tricky, but i'll accept your point.
> 
>  > and that it's complete enough to actually reproduce the binary
>  > in question.  But if somebody actually is using vanilla unmodified BusyBox
>  > 1.1.3, I'm actually more interested in confirming that and getting
>  > their .config file than getting another copy of the same source tarball.
> 
> you mean "i" as a customer, in this case, not as the busybox maintainer,
> correct?  i as a customer am also interested in knowing what version
> it was, and getting the .config file, but i see no reason that the
> place i got the binary from shouldn't be able to give me the sources.
> that's what the GPL is all about.
> 
>  >
>  > Now if Morris was still on Erik's DSL line, rather than hosted by OSL,
>  > conserving bandwidth for the project would be important.  But these days
>  > there's things like sourceforge that are quite happy to mirror open source
>  > projects, so getting extra mirrors of vanilla release tarballs generally
>  > isn't a major limiting factor.
>  >
>  > By harassing Mepis (and presumably others like them), as far as I can tell the
>  > FSF is just making a neusance of itself, scaring people away from using GPL
>  > software and trying to solve a non-problem.  I'm curious what other people's
>  > opinions are.
> 
> i agree that it _appears_ to be a non-problem.  but see the
> message from natanael copa in this thread.  he admits that he
> as a distro for which he doesn't make source available (even
> though its modified source!  we'll ignore that for now.  :-).

Its not that I don't want to share my work. Its just laziness. Besides,
I have done efforts to get my changes include upstream. I might break
the characters in the license (probably not, since I will ship the
sources on demand and its non-commercial) but I'm sure I'm not breaking
the *spirit* of the GPL. I do my very best the share all my changes
upstream.

> probably whoever natanael's giving his distro to doesn't really care,

If they ask for the source I'd be happy to help them to send them. If
this casues problem for you (or kernel.org - im using the kernel too)
I'd do whatever I can to help.

> but what if it were montavista saying, "our source comes straight
> from redhat -- go to them" -- would that be okay?  i don't think so.
> 
> as far as busybox goes, i don't see how this affects the project
> at all.  we (the project itself) don't distribute binary releases
> at all, right?

Yes. this is a non-problem for busybox. It's worse for me... 

> paul
> =---------------------
>  paul fox, pgf at brightstareng.com
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