| |||||||||||||
Preferred form for whom?Preferred form for whom?Posted Mar 9, 2011 12:56 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)In reply to: Preferred form for whom? by dwmw2 Parent article: Red Hat and the GPL
> The GPL requires that the source be distributed in the "preferred form of
> the work for making modifications to it". > ... > where the work is a fork or modification of an existing project, the > situation is very different.
Note that the GPL is incompatible with licenses that mandate distribution of forks as a patch or series of patches (like the gnuplot license).
(Log in to post comments)
Preferred form for whom? Posted Mar 9, 2011 14:57 UTC (Wed) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] Note that the GPL is incompatible with licenses that mandate distribution of forks as a patch or series of patches (like the gnuplot license).No, the mere fact of requiring that modified sources be distributed in base+patch form rather than as a monolithic tarball is not what makes the gnuplot licence incompatible with the GPL. If you are shipping GPL-based code and, like the gnuplot authors, you want to insist on that behaviour, all you need to do with is add a clarifying note stating explicitly what we all know, which is that "where you distribute a modified form of the software, the preferred form for modifications is the original upstream code base, plus your patches to it." In the gnuplot case, it is other clauses which impose additional restrictions that are incompatible with the GPL. For example the requirement to distribute the patches with the binaries, while the GPL only requires you to provide sources on demand. And the requirement to provide your name and address when you ship a modified version, etc.
|
|||||||||||||