Re: legalities of distributing debian pre-installed iso images.

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 02:57:09PM +0200, luther wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a question concerning the distribution of modified kernels,
> modified boot-floppies and pre-installed debian iso image.

Sorry for probably breaking the thread, but i am not subscribed to
debian-legal and i forgot to ask for a cc, so i just read the responses
on the mail archive. Please CC me in the future ?

Anyway, Branden wrote :

> I would *not* provide instructions for using a Debian mirror unless
> the stuff on the binary ISO really is unmodified.

Well, the iso image is just a cloop compressed copy of debian/unstable
installation. The sources were not modified, and come plainly from the
debian mirrors. I suppose that getting the dpkg -l output or something
such, and going to snapshot.debian.net searching for the corresponding
source packages should do. Is it really necessary to have an iso with
the whole sources ? It is not as if we would be able to remove them from
the net anyway, so the sources will be available as long as debian
exists, or at least as long as our archive size doesn't overgrow too
much or something.

Would a link to the snapshot.debian.net be enough in this case ? I
really don't feel like hunting for each individual package version, and
get the source of it. Sure it could probably be automated with a nice
script, but is it really necessary ?

Now, for the boot-floppies, the situation is different, since i actually
modified them a bit (in a hacky way though, so it cannot easily be feed
back to the CVS, and i don't want to work on it much, since focus is on
debian-installer these days) as well as included a modified kernel and a
modified parted. Providing the sources for these three packages would be
enough to comply with the GPL, i feel.

Friendly,

Sven Luther