Re: Bad license on VCG?
On Sat, Aug 31, 2002 at 07:08:56PM +1200, Nick Phillips wrote:
> I knew someone would come up with that. There is however no other reasonable
> interpretation of the GPL possible.
>
> If you take your argument to its logical conclusion then I can immediately
> prevent you from distributing, say, gcc by going through the sources,
> improving the comments, and refusing to distribute my new version at all.
No. "Preferred form for modification" is not "preferred version for
modification". If we both have a copy of unobfuscated GCC source, and
yours has better comments, we both still have it in the same form:
unobfuscated C. You just happen to have a better version.
Your "available" would undermine the GPL. If I opted not to download
source when downloading a GPL binary, and the source becomes unavailable,
I could say that the source is not available to me and distribute the
binaries. I could do the same if I lost it, and maybe even if I was under
NDA. (It's not available! It's secret!) The GPL is designed to prevent
you from distributing binaries at all if you can't also distribute source.
--
Glenn Maynard
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