Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL
On July 24, 2019 12:34:13 AM UTC, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 02:14:38AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
>> On Wed, 2019-07-24 at 00:49:24 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
>> > ##################
>> > I do not consider a flat tarball to be a preferred form for
>modification.
>> > Thus, like any non-source form, it must be accompanied by a way to
>obtain
>> > the actual form for modification. There are many such ways --
>unless you
>> > distribute the software in highly unusual circumstances, a link to
>a
>> > network server suffices; see the text of the GPL for further
>details.
>> > ##################
>
>> > * comments giving rationale for a change tend to be written as VCS
>commit
>> > messages
>
>> This concept keeps being put forward from time to time, and it keeps
>> making little sense to me. The "preferred form of the work for making
>> modifications to it" is the actual source files, that's the work. A
>> tarball is a way to *transport* and *disseminate* those files, it's
>> not the work, and people do not edit the tarball. A VCS can be used
>> to *record* those modifications, or to *transport* and *disseminate*
>> them, in the same way you could do with a series of patches. But
>> "modifying" the VCS is a by-product of having modified the actual
>> source.
>
>By this logic, a pile of .c files with comments removed or preprocessed
>with cpp would be allowed as well. The VCS is also a means to store
>human-readable comments.
>
>Another piece of [meta]data that a flat tarball lacks is authorship
>information.
>
I infer from this you think projects without a public VCS (postfix is an example) belong in non-free?
Scott K
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