It's not that hard

It's not that hard

Posted Mar 6, 2008 23:58 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: BusyBox settles another lawsuit by macson_g
Parent article: BusyBox settles another lawsuit

No, you don't have to host any source code on your site. You can enclose an offer with your device to supply source on request, and you can charge your costs for supplying that source.

It's only a pain if you don't set up your operations to handle it, and it's a small cost considering that you get all that software for free.

For example, you could produce an ISO file for all the GPL/LGPL sources on your device, and tell people that if they want it, they can send a stamped, self-addressed envelope and a few dollars (or appropriate currency) to cover costs. You're not supposed to make a profit on that, but if it takes an employee 30 minutes to get the CD burned and put it in the mail, you can charge for that time. Or you could just have the sources CD in your catalog; figure out what the fair price is for selling it at cost (CD cost plus shipping and handling), and you comply.

But many organizations find it simplest to just host the source code on their site.

If this is all too scary to you, then I suppose that you can buy your OS from Microsoft or QNX or someone else. But then you've got to pay money.

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> FWIW, I used to work for a company that used some GPL and other free software in its
product. We found the easiest way to comply was to simply build the tarballs from our CVS and
include them on the product CD. The customer thus got the version we were using, including any
mods. This, of course, assumes you're not trying to hide the fact that you're using free
software.

My employer does something similar, though we aren't in the end-user business.  Instead, we
actually ship to our customers a full source tree. One of the targets of the build system
takes all of the GPL'd components and emits a nice tarball of the exact source used to build a
binary image.