Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL
On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 05:18:28AM +0000, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On July 24, 2019 12:34:13 AM UTC, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
> >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?
At this moment, not yet. Obviously, old projects didn't even _have_ a VCS,
and I'm not proposing imposing a VCS workflow on the upstream. I'd like to
consider, at some point in the future, hidden private VCSes where the upstream
occassionally releases a tarball of to be non-free, just like the same PNG
image can be free if there's no XCF file but is not if the upstream holds a
private XCF version they routinely modify -- a "preferred form for
modification" is not required to be good, merely no worse than what upstream
themselves use.
What I'm proposing today is to let upstreams demand no freeness regressions,
in the spirit of my understanding of the GPL.
And while we don't have 3.0 (git) yet, I argue that a technical solution of
requiring a link to a public git service (assuming no extraordinary needs on
the recipient's side), while not very good, meets GPL3 and sort of GPL2.
Meow!
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