The FSF's being stupid again, it seems...

[Paul Fox]

rob wrote:
 > What's important to me is that people can _get_ the source code to reproduce 
 > the binary they've got.  (Nobody's letting anyone off the hook for that.  It 
 > must be available.)  And it can be tricky to make sure you've got the _right_ 
 > source code, 

not really so tricky, but i'll accept your point.

 > and that it's complete enough to actually reproduce the binary 
 > in question.  But if somebody actually is using vanilla unmodified BusyBox 
 > 1.1.3, I'm actually more interested in confirming that and getting 
 > their .config file than getting another copy of the same source tarball.

you mean "i" as a customer, in this case, not as the busybox maintainer,
correct?  i as a customer am also interested in knowing what version
it was, and getting the .config file, but i see no reason that the
place i got the binary from shouldn't be able to give me the sources.
that's what the GPL is all about.

 > 
 > Now if Morris was still on Erik's DSL line, rather than hosted by OSL, 
 > conserving bandwidth for the project would be important.  But these days 
 > there's things like sourceforge that are quite happy to mirror open source 
 > projects, so getting extra mirrors of vanilla release tarballs generally 
 > isn't a major limiting factor.
 > 
 > By harassing Mepis (and presumably others like them), as far as I can tell the 
 > FSF is just making a neusance of itself, scaring people away from using GPL 
 > software and trying to solve a non-problem.  I'm curious what other people's 
 > opinions are.

i agree that it _appears_ to be a non-problem.  but see the
message from natanael copa in this thread.  he admits that he
as a distro for which he doesn't make source available (even
though its modified source!  we'll ignore that for now.  :-). 
probably whoever natanael's giving his distro to doesn't really care,
but what if it were montavista saying, "our source comes straight
from redhat -- go to them" -- would that be okay?  i don't think so.

as far as busybox goes, i don't see how this affects the project
at all.  we (the project itself) don't distribute binary releases
at all, right?

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at brightstareng.com