Netfilter gets a GPL-enforcement injunction

Posted Apr 22, 2004 17:55 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Aye, but (b) is also a choice:

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange;

A "medium customarily used for software interchange" would by any modern
definition include the internet as one such medium, PARTICULARLY given the
use of the internet for just such interchange, of Linux and other GPL
licenced software, in general. Thus, a URL would be sufficient.

Then comes the question of whether pointing to the source hosted by
someone else would be sufficient. I think it could be, certainly in a
simple redirect from your site to the other site, so the URL would be
yours, but I could be wrong. However, in any case, the problem if it WAS
hosted by an unrelated third party would be ensuring that it remains up
for the necessary three years. Obviously, you'd be liable if the third
party failed to host it for whatever reason, and most businesses wouldn't
find such liability acceptable. That said, what they /could/ do would be
simply provide a mirror of the original software site, which would neatly
alleviate site update and administration issues, except for the hardware.

Now that I think about it, perhaps that's one reason mirrors of anything
widely used in open source are generally not so hard to find.

Duncan


Duncan