On Sunday 15 March 2009 15:33:23 Oliver Schneider wrote: > > IANAL and TINLA, but you will probably only need to provide source for > > software that appears on the image that was licensed to your company > > under the LGPL or GPL. Those licenses give a number of options for how > > you can satisfy the requirement to provide source. > > Well, as far as I know a "pointer" (e.g. hyper link) to the source is > sufficient unless it's a modified version of the GPL'd product. Also, we > could for example offer a download of all source DEBs from our customer > zone as well. This is kind of pointless though, because it would make > more sense to offer the tools (scripts) to create the image and have > those tools use an existing installation of Etch or Lenny, for example.
Distribution of binaries built from GPLv2 source is covered by section 3 of that license. The relevant options are: a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) Usually, this prohibits "simply" providing a "pointer" to the source code. The other versions on the GPL and the various versions of the LGPL have similar clauses, though the wording is different. Option a is certainly not a "pointer"; option b can only involve a "pointer" if your organization and guarantee that pointer works for 3 years (if you use someone else's server and it goes down permanently after a year, suddenly you are in violation of the GPL); option c may or may not be applicable to you. (I'm not sure if Debian's distribution method counts as option a or option b, but I'd be inclined to say option a, since the official Debian machines distribute the source code along-side the binaries.) -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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