3 ms·
The GPL school is definitely in the passive-aggressive means of control camp. They don't want freedom unless it's their brand of free. Disclaimer: IANAL. That
by durin42 17y ago
The GPL school is definitely in the passive-aggressive means of control camp. They don't want freedom unless it's their brand of free.
Disclaimer: IANAL. That said, I think part of the reason to enforce cases like this is that if this clause in the license goes unenforced for long enough with the IP holders not suing, then it becomes an implicit rewriting of the "must provide source" part of the license, and then weakens any later legal case.
I agree, the provision to provide a tarball of source is silly. It probably made more sense in the days of semi-disconnected FTP sites before http and Google made everything so much more discoverable.
- inklesspen 17y agoGPLv3 explicitly says that you can link to the source being available elsewhere ("may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party)"), but if that server goes down, you have to come up with a new link. And of course, that only works if you're using the package unmodified; the source you link to has to be the source you compiled. So it's not as if the FSF isn't trying to make things reasonable.