On 5 Feb 2003, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 11:58, Nilmoni Deb wrote:
> > Note that your obligation is strictly to the recipients of binaries
> > (i.e., your customers). You have no responsibility to the "community" at
> > large."
>
> This is correct. Its actually very important. A lot of GPL software is
> created by a small company for another. It would be completely unfair
> for that small company to be expected to ship stuff to everyone. Their
> customer may choose to but then they must distribute sources and so in
> turn.
While one issue stands resolved (that a vendor complying with clause 3a of
GPL 2.0 does not have to comply with 3b), the GPL may have been
misprepresented by MontaVista, as per the opinion of a FSF member (Dave
Turner via RT <license-violation@fsf.org>):
-------- EXCERPT STARTS ---------
> Note that your obligation is strictly to the recipients of binaries
> (i.e., your customers). You have no responsibility to the "community" at
> large."
>
>
> Its the last sentence that is of concern. Does this mean no 3rd
> party (who is not a customer) can get the GPL source code part of their
> products ?
Actually, they're wrong -- if they choose (3)(b), their offer must be
open to all third parties. And they're wrong about who their
"obligation" is to -- legally speaking, their license comes from the
copyright holder.
-------- EXCERPT ENDS ---------
> Montavista feed a fair bit of stuff back into the kernel, especially at
> the mips end of the universe.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 07 2003 - 22:00:18 EST