On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 08:14:43PM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 02:00:36PM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
>> offer" clause is in practice very hard to comply with. (Especially for
>> GPLv2-only projects. The GPLv3 has made it slightly more practical,
>> admittedly.) In my experience, most projects actually choose to just
>> upload the source code next to the binaries. And those that do pick the
>> "written offer" solution do not actually do so in a fully compliant
way.
>
> You just proved my point. If you have the source available for
> download next to the binaries, the license is satisfied.
It is actually more complicated than that: There are really two kinds of
projects distributing binaries:
* Those who care about what binaries they ship and build everything from
source will typically just upload the source code they used to build their
binaries next to their binaries. But those are not the target of this
change proposal to begin with.
* Those who just redistribute random binaries that somebody else (usually a
distribution) built typically do not bother even telling users where the
binaries come from, let alone pointing them to the source code.
> Look, it's not hard. If I put up foo.c on a web page, and next to it
> the matching a.out and GPLv2.txt, even if that a.out is stripped
> and has no identifying information, I'm satisfying the terms of the GPL,
> version 2.0, §3a.
Sure, but what those projects are actually doing is putting up an a.out that
somebody else built, without even downloading the foo.c, let alone uploading
it next to the a.out.
Sure, there are people who violate licenses maliciously or through
sloppiness. But this proposal isn't really about sources: it's about
origin metadata. Whether this metadata is there doesn't force or prevent
people from following the license. And as extensively argued in the other
parts of the thread, there are various scenarios where it's reasonable
and OK to have binaries without package metadata (even the example of
typical initrd images built by dracut…).
Zbyszek