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

Riku Voipio riku.voipio at iki.fi
Thu Jun 29 08:54:39 UTC 2006


On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 05:40:31PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> Currently, the GPL says (section 3b) that all you need is a written offer, 
> good for three years, saying you'll send the source to people who ask for it.  
AFAIK mepis people did not provide a section 3b offer[0], so FSF 
eventually notified them about it. 

> But 
> apparently, this is not good enough for the FSF, and in GPLv3 they're making 
> it so you have to mirror the source on the web 24/7, whether you want to or 
> not, even if you didn't modify it.

By my reading of GPL3 draft[1] this not really the case. It says you
have to provide equivalent access to the sourcecode as to the binaries
you provide. It also doesn't require you to distribute old versions,
only the ones whose binaries you distribute now.

The main difference is that with GPL v3 you can't use 3b style offer 
for online distribution (no physical medium involved).

> 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.

Please voice this to FSF - GPL3 is still WiP so they might actually 
listen. I presume Harald Welte who deals with both busybox violations 
and gplv3 would be good contact too.

I argee in principle. However, such statement is useless if upstream 
is no longer distributing busybox 1.1.3, and through some other unlucky
circumstances nobody else is distributing busybox 1.1.3 anymore. So
if the somebody does not have to distribute busybox 1.1.3 sources
with it's binaries, where would you get it?

> Now if Morris was still on Erik's DSL line, rather than hosted by OSL, 
> conserving bandwidth for the project would be important.  

They clarify the requirement that it does not necessarily need to be
them same server, you can arrange it with someone else. Personally
I think this can be turned into a good thing, for example such service
could be provided by snapshot.debian.net, OSDL, sf.net and so on. 

Thus finding old versions of qemu, gzip and the busybox 1.1.3 
would no longer be a problem for you :)
 
> I'm curious what other people's opinions are.

I think it's very good that people are aware

Cheers,
Riku

[0] http://mailman.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2004-November/004752.html
[1] http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft



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