Questions about licenses

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Sunday 02 December 2007 03:35, Roberto A. Foglietta wrote:
> Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > I am not a lawyer, and my answer is not authoritative.
> >
> > My understanding is that if you use busybox in your device,
> > you have to provide users with means to build the same busybox
> > from source.
>
>   I do not think so. Building the same busybox from sources would be
> required if GPLv3 has been choosen. In this case distribuitor could
> choose GPLv2 and release everything under v2 conditions which requires
> to deliver at quasi-zero costs the source code. You would not release
> your toolchain and/or cross compiling enviroment.

What's the point in having a license which require that licensee
provides *some* sources, but does not require that functionally equivalent
busybox binary can be built from this source?

Such license would be totally useless, as it is trivially circumvented by 
providing irrelevant source.
Like, providing unmodified busybox-1.3.0 source but actually using patched
busybox-1.8.2 one.

I think that GPLv2 requires that licensee provides the source they actually
use to build their binary, not some semirandom collection of text files
with .c and .h extensions.
--
vda