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Preferred formPreferred formPosted Mar 5, 2011 17:56 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Preferred form by corbet Parent article: Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)
I always interpreted "preferred form" to be the original source, rather than, say, object files or preprocessor output. [...] The idea being that you can modify and rebuild the program. Yes, the intention is surely that you get precisely the source code for the code that is being run, not just a set of patches against some other archive that you have to track down. After reading an LWN news item a few weeks ago, I ended up on a site which offered patches for a selection of packages to be obtained from their upstream locations for the software suite mentioned in the news item. Since some of the packages were LGPL- and GPL-licensed, I sent a question to the person responsible for licence compliance at the organisation concerned, noting that this links-plus-patches page probably wouldn't be good enough to comply with those licences, but also noting that this wouldn't matter unless the site in question were the primary means of giving the sources to those who had received binaries from that organisation. It turned out that the links-plus-patches page was merely for everybody else on the Internet, as I suspected. So in fact, as myself and the representative of the organisation concerned agreed, offering separate patches is a convenience, but it probably isn't suitable as a means of complying with copyleft licences, as indeed the GPL FAQ notes.
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Preferred form Posted Mar 6, 2011 0:53 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] That is quite different. An SRPM contains the upstream, unmodified source; (optionally) some patches against the above; a set of instructions on how to create and build the binaries from the preceding; and some ancilliary stuff. So there isn't any question of "distributing patches without original source". You might argue SRPMs fail the GPL because they don't give you the modified sources... ;-)
Preferred form Posted Mar 7, 2011 17:07 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I don't want to mention any names, but I wasn't talking about SRPMs exclusively, although this is obviously Red Hat's preferred mechanism for distribution. Nevertheless, you make a good point: Debian source packaging is done with upstream archives, patch archives, and some stuff which lets you combine them. I imagine that the GPL permits such distribution practices because all the different parts come from the same place and involve widely-available technologies for putting everything together.
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