On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > > If I am distributing the hypothetical binary image over the Net, though,
> > > is it not sufficient for me to link to the source tarballs I used?
> >
> > Certainly for non commercial cases.
> >
> > > Actually, I suspect an offer to e-mail the kernel source to anyone, in
> > > exchange for them paying the resultant phone bill (at 8p/min on a 28.8K
> > > modem, of course) would technically fulfil the requirements of "b"; I
> > > received a browser and SSL support by e-mail just a few weeks ago.
> >
> > Try that in Guyana say. The GPL applies beyond the western world. Obvioously
> > FTP downloaded code implies source download is sane but shipping binary CD
> > saying 'download the source' clearly only works for subsets of the planet
>
> Perhaps it doesn't. One could offer to ship the source in the exact
> same medium the binary is shipped in at cost. The point is that source code
> does not *have* to be shipped with the binary, it just has to be made
> availible at cost to whomever the binary is made availible to.
The problem here is that I may not have the resources to do this. I could
put the hypothetical repair disk image on my free ISP webspace, and let
people download it from there. However, the GPL then requires me to
include a written offer to supply the source to these people at or
below cost. One problem is how to include a written offer with a download,
of course; presumably a message to that effect on the WWW page would
suffice.
The big problem, though, is how am I supposed to supply the source? I
probably won't have enough space on my personal WWW site to fit all the
kernel source and the source to all the other utilities; even if I did,
ftp.*.kernel.org are much better places to go, so what's the point?
Legally, then, I would have to offer to mail the source on CDr or
something similar. Hopefully, this would just be a technicality and no-one
would take me up on the offer - but it's not a risk I want to take. I
don't want to become a mail order CD burning service running at a 0%
profit margin, and frankly there's no point in this requirement.
James.
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