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

[Daniel Dickinson]

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On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 17:40:31 -0400
Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> 
> 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.

The FSF may also be looking to future lawsuits, in which, if they leave
things go, a commercial entity doesn't give (exact) sources, and says
that they don't have to, because of established common practise.  

And is it really all that hard to keep the correct sources available?
I mean if you're making a binary snapshot for a release, why not make a
source snapshot as well (assuming you're modifying the source)?  If you
want to release vanilla source and a separate patchset, that works too,
and, if you have multiple projects could save the space by reducing the
number of vanilla sources you provide.

It may be inconvenient, but imnho it's the price you pay for being
given the right to use GPL'd software, and I think it's just
inconvenient, not some outrageous demand, and in fact I think it's a
good thing.

A while ago I was trying to put together an cd of open source software,
with the right sources, so that I could deal with problems, even after
upstream died (as seems to be common with windows ports of linux
software, and less popular windows projects) and was astounded by the
number of projects for which finding source code was a problem, even
though supposedly gpl.  I started with a bunch of stuff from GnuWin,
but they didn't have sources afaik, only pointed to upstream, which,
less than three years later, were frequently dead and gone.

As a gpl consumer I want the sources that will let me rebuild a given
project (including installer, though that's more of an issue for
windows, though I tend to question the usefulness of the gpl for
software that depends on proprietary tools anyway, but I at least
would like to be able to introduce friends to floss without insisting
on them jumping to linux or bsd).

- -- 
And that's my crabbing done for the day.  Got it out of the way early, 
now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or 
strangle cute bunnies or something.   -- Michael Devore

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