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.
It seems to me that such "equivalent access" is offered, and the sources are
accessible that way. The presence of these lines in sources.list does not
add or remove any capability to access the source code; they merely instruct
APT to retrieve and scan the (sometimes large) list of source packages when
"apt-get update" is run. This makes it more convenient to retrieve source
packages, at the expense of using significantly more bandwidth, user time,
disk space, etc.
Would it satisfy your concerns if the installation procedure asked the user
whether or not they wanted this configuration by default? It seems unfair to
impose this additional overhead on every user.
It seems that the current installation procedure does this by default, but
now that I realize this, I think that it is more appropriate to ask.
--
- mdz
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