Re: emacs-snapshot for arm
On 20/08/10 10:51, Martin Guy wrote:
[snip]
> I mailed you off-list to share awareness of this issue. I must say, a
> public rebuttal to a private message, changing nothing and just making
> excuses is disappointing. I don't want you to take the stuff down -
> it's a great public service you are doing by making them available - I
> just want you to understand the GPL and think about following it,
> since it explicitly forbids publishing binary blobs.
I'm not familiar with the fine detail of the GPLv3, but the GPLv2
certainly doesn't forbid the publishing of binary blobs. It does
however put certain conditions on their distribution, and doesn't seem
to have anticipated this particular circumstance - that of someone
providing a service of doing the tedious job of building a large piece
of source.
> To be legal, all you need to do is read the GPL, understand it, and
> follow its terms of use. To follow it to the letter, you need to
> either put the Debian source package next to the binaries or copy the
> COPYING license file there and put a README including an offer to send
> the sources by post (!).
That does seem to be the easiest way of conforming with the GPL in this
case. The offer needs to be open to everybody (not just the person to
whom you provide the binaries) but you are allowed to make a small
charge for the distribution.
John
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