Other stuff from the board meeting... [LWN.net]

Other stuff from the board meeting...

Posted Mar 18, 2008 11:46 UTC (Tue) by mdomsch (subscriber, #5920)
In reply to: Other stuff from the board meeting... by JoeBuck
Parent article: Fedora 9 to remove pointers to proprietary codecs

I understand, the "send a SASE" reduces the need to have a stack of pressed media to mail.  It
does not reduce the indeterminate end-time of the 3b) clock, meaning we would have to ensure
that if someone does send a SASE several years from now (again, could be 4+ years, we don't
know and can't set an "end date" on the offer), that someone would exist to receive that SASE,
burn the media, and mail it back, without failure to do so or error on their part.  We prefer
to be done with our legal obligation at the time of distribution, rather than carry the
additional obligation for an indefinite time into the future.

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Other stuff from the board meeting...

Posted Mar 18, 2008 12:39 UTC (Tue) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

With a little bit of pre-planning, couldn't you make this process fairly fool-proof?
Specifically:

1) Decide to only distribute binary CDs/DVDs of actual Fedora and Enterprise releases, not
(say) alpha and beta builds.

2) Generate *.iso files for the corresponding source CDs/DVDs up front.

3) Store the *.iso files on high-reliability storage (a properly backed-up RAID server or
something).

When somebody asks for source code, just grab and burn the appropriate *.iso.

Realistically, this would cost a week of engineering time to set up, and a few hundred dollars
a year in RAID drives and server administration. GPL 3b is pretty obnoxious in this
day-and-age, but it's not that huge a hassle for anybody with good long-term data storage.