Re: Bug#129629: Not really distributing sources
On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Your understanding of the GPL matches your respect for its author. It
> requires offering "equivalent access" to the source code. If the
> usual access to the binaries is with apt, the sources must be
> accessible that way too.
I'm sorry, this seems very arbitary to me..
The usual access to Debian is via http or ftp. The usual program for
access is APT, however many other options are available, including wget,
lynx, lftp, mozilla etc.
The reason I think it is is arbitary is because the existance of APT (even
a specific feature) seems to effect your perception of how Debian as a
whole is following the spirit of the GPL. If I never wrote APT and
everyone still used a collection of dselect methods would you have the
same concern? Would it be necessary to add source download support to
dselect? If I had written APT but had not added source support, would you
deem that unnacceptable? When we had our FTP layout so that the binaries
and source were not in the same directory, would that not be considered
equivilant access?
The reason the standard APT example sources.list does not include
uncommented deb-src lines is two fold, most users will not be using the
source feature and having them enabled significantly increases the
download time - plus, APT gives a very clear message of what to do when
those lines are not present and the user tries to fetch sources (it is
easy to opt in). I think this is the best default operation.
Modern base-configs override this and install their own configuration file
that does unconditionally include sources, I disagree with this choice,
but it is not mine to make <shrug>
Jason
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