| |||||||||||||
durable physical mediumdurable physical mediumPosted Jan 24, 2006 0:01 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957)In reply to: durable physical medium by sanjoy Parent article: Suits and Patents: A Report from the GPLv3 Launch Conference
If you ship the binaries and the source code at the same time, none of that matters. It's only if you offer just the binaries. This won't bother developers at all, only people who distribute binaries without source -- who, if they had the resources to distribute the binaries, should have no problems with the source.
(Log in to post comments)
durable physical medium Posted Jan 24, 2006 19:07 UTC (Tue) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link] All good points. Although one case I was thinking about, from a recent discussion on debian-legal, is if you want to hand out OpenOffice CD's or Knoppix CD's, as good publicity for free software. Ideally you'd just like to tell anyone who asks: "Go to openoffice.org for the 1GB of source code." That relies on provision 3(c) of the GPL: Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. But if you downloaded OpenOffice from openoffice.org, then you cannot rely on provision 3(c) because it is available only if you (a) are noncommerical, which you might be, and (b) if you received a written, three-year offer when you got the program, in accordance with your upstream source following provision 3(b). Openoffice.org, as far as I know, isn't providing such an offer. They (reasonably) just offer you source and binary on the same website, which is following provision 3(a).
|
|||||||||||||