Think about people from "other side"!

Think about people from "other side"!

Posted Mar 21, 2008 9:07 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Seems unnecessary by mdomsch
Parent article: Fedora's advice on GPL compliance

The real problem with paragraph 3b is the 3-year clock that restarts every time someone hands out a DVD on behalf of the Project.

And this restart is very, VERY, VERY good.

If 8 years from now, someone who is a Fedora Ambassador and had a pile of leftover PPC DVDs gives them to Goodwill, is Fedora still on the hook to provide source to Goodwill on request in 11 years?

Stop. Answer simple question: why the hell Goodwill will even need this pile of obsolete binary packages in first place? Probably because their old systems are not supported by new, state-of-the-art distributions. But what if some error will be found in old packages after two years of use? What then? At that point packages are 10 years old - and probably noone have sources for them! Not even the RedHat (the story started with problems of keeping these sources around)! So now Goodwill is well and truly screwed...

Conclusion: the exact reason for inconvinience IS reason to demand sources in this way. If noone from RedHat keeps binaries around - no need to keep sources around. Bud when you decide that binaries must be gone, they should be gone. Destroyed. Burned. Crushed. Then 3 years later you'll be clear of the obligations (and if some employer will give out odd old package without company consent you can claim ignorance). Don't give people false hope - that's worse then nothing!

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