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

[yan]

David Daney wrote:
> Rob Landley wrote:
>>
>> Who said anything about changing the license?  I'm disagreeing with 
>> the FSF's interpretation, which seems to disagree with the actual 
>> license text.  I _like_ the GPL (version 2, anyway).  I'm just 
>> annoyed at the FSF for discouraging its use.
>>
>
> At times many have had similar frustrations.
>
> Big picture view: For the most part the FSF has been hugely 
> beneficial.  However, whenever you have more than two 
> people/oganizations interacting there will be occasional disagreements.
>
> On this particular issue, I think it best to withhold judgment for a 
> while so that we can see its effects.  The FSF has a fairly good track 
> record on making decisions the further its goals.
I guess for me the issue is this:

I have built a toolchain for a particular hardware platform I work on.  
I am not the primary developer, nor the hardware manufacturer, just a 
user.  I built the toolchain to address some isues that were present in 
the toolchain provided by the manufacturer.

I have posted the toolchain on my website; binary only as anyone can 
build it using Dan Kegel's tools.  It's more a convenience than anything 
else.  It's been up for nearly 6 months; since then I've had not a 
single request for sources.  And from monitoring the maillist, people 
are using it.

But the way I read v3, I also have to make available a) all of Dan 
Kegel's stuff, b) a source tarball for everything that goes into it.

I've also written a few things for a particular buildroot environment.  
So if I make those binaries available, I also have to provide all of the 
source.  Never mind that the "application" consists of scripts that 
download the source from other sites....

That's absurd, and for me, it will lead to removing those files from my 
website.

I've had a hard enough time convincing my company to go open source.  
Adding the burden of hosting gigabytes of sources and the associated 
overhead of keeping a website up to date every time we release an update 
may convince mgt to pull the plug on opensource altogether and go with a 
closed, proprietary solution.

Just my $0.02....

--Yan