Questions about licenses

[Mike Frysinger]

On Sunday 02 December 2007, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Sunday 02 December 2007 03:35, Roberto A. Foglietta wrote:
> > Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > > I am not a lawyer, and my answer is not authoritative.
> > >
> > > My understanding is that if you use busybox in your device,
> > > you have to provide users with means to build the same busybox
> > > from source.
> >
> >   I do not think so. Building the same busybox from sources would be
> > required if GPLv3 has been choosen. In this case distribuitor could
> > choose GPLv2 and release everything under v2 conditions which requires
> > to deliver at quasi-zero costs the source code. You would not release
> > your toolchain and/or cross compiling enviroment.
>
> What's the point in having a license which require that licensee
> provides *some* sources, but does not require that functionally equivalent
> busybox binary can be built from this source?
>
> Such license would be totally useless, as it is trivially circumvented by
> providing irrelevant source.
> Like, providing unmodified busybox-1.3.0 source but actually using patched
> busybox-1.8.2 one.
>
> I think that GPLv2 requires that licensee provides the source they actually
> use to build their binary, not some semirandom collection of text files
> with .c and .h extensions.

not sure where that weird interpretation came from ... as Denys indicates, you 
need to provide the sources to the binaries you shipped.  versioning and such 
is irrelevant.  you provided binary $foo whose sources are under GPL-2 which 
means you must provide the exact source code which produced $foo.

but really, people shouldnt be asking for licensing help from a list that 
contains no lawyers.  go pay some lawyer to figure out what you need to do in 
order to comply with the licenses of the source code you're too lazy to write 
yourself ;).
-mike
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