The git tree is the source code

Posted Nov 10, 2012 12:41 UTC (Sat) by branden (guest, #7029)
In reply to: The git tree is the source code by epa
Parent article: Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog)

That's what I said about two years ago. The few people at Red Hat who could be troubled to respond to my argument at all basically told me to go pound sand.

It will be interesting see if the definition of "preferred form for modifying the work" now changes for the sake of whacking Oracle with a stick.

Which, to be fair, is not without its appeal...

The git tree is the source code

Posted Nov 10, 2012 14:03 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

It will be interesting see if the definition of "preferred form for modifying the work" now changes for the sake of whacking Oracle with a stick.

Not at all. “Closed internal repo with only occasional tarballs drop for outside consumption” is how FSF developed it's flagship products (Emacs, GCC, GLiBC) for years starting from the very beginning. And they created the GPL, remember?

P.S. You may say that FSF eventually opened their repos but remember that this was political decision, not copyright-dictated one.

The git tree is the source code

Posted Nov 10, 2012 19:51 UTC (Sat) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (1 responses)

The "preferred form for modifying the work" has changed with time as the state of the art has developed. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was sccs, rcs, and eventually cvs. Most development was done by small teams, and the growth of larger free software communities, and a social environment accompanied by effective source management tools to support that social environment -- was in the future. Did the FSF lag behind some other organizations in moving to these tools? Yes and no. Though some of their projects, which are often quite "loosely" within the FSF umbrella, moved faster than others, the FSF also promoted early DVCS efforts like GNU Arch, and made sure that alternatives to the early proprietary social programming sites like sourceforge (which was briefly free software) were available.

We owe them our gratitude. Remember that their resources are often orders of magnitude less than that of even the free software companies.

The git tree is the source code

Posted Nov 15, 2012 13:36 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

I can get Linus' kernel source as a tarball, unpack it and make a git repo for my own use, and thus have a set up that makes my development more productive. I might even throw in some other, closed source tools for my own pleasure. That doesn't mean anybody is entitled to said tools results. What GPL demands is the source code to study and modify, not random gossip on who wrote what line and changed what else. The same way it doesn't require anybody to ship the editor, compiler and whatnot the developers require for their work.