Giving up your keys

Giving up your keys

Posted Aug 6, 2005 22:30 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Giving up your keys by man_ls
Parent article: Wiring DRM into the system

I believe the argument that GPL requires the distributor to supply his signing key is this:

GPL says that if I give you a binary, I must also give you all the source material needed to build that binary. Not just a similar binary; the one I actually gave you. I have to give you the scripts that contain the linker options I used, for one thing. Giving you the signing key isn't much of a stretch from that.

You can argue technically either way, but the spirit of the GPL is that the recipient of a binary is supposed to be able to make useful modifications. Shipping a binary that works only because it's signed with a key the recipient doesn't know clearly does an end run around that goal and produces the same result as shipping object code without source.

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