Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[peltz@jaka.ece.uiuc.edu (Steve Peltz)]

In article <5pim4l$5m3$1@news.nyu.edu>,
Richard Kenner <kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:
>In article <5ph4g5$sbs$1@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> peltz@jaka.ece.uiuc.edu (Steve Peltz) writes:
>>In article <5pbd6q$8si$1@news.nyu.edu>,
>>Richard Kenner <kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:
>>>You are perhaps correct that a formal policy of not giving future
>>>releases to people who've redistributed in the past might violate at
>>>least the spirit of the GPL, but nobody has proposed doing that.  The
>>
>>I'm not sure what you're saying. Restricting the rights of your customers
>>to pass on source code to someone else is certainly against both the
>>spirit and letter of the GPL. Threatening to drop them as a customer
>>if they do so is well within the meaning of "restrict".
>
>You seem to have missed the "nobody has proposed doing that" above.

Nobody has proposed a FORMAL policy. There's a strong implication in
several earlier responses indicating that there is an informal policy of
doing just that: "we don't have to do business with people who distribute
it ... wink wink". I don't object to ASKING people to not distribute it,
but threatening them with retaliation if they do seems to be violating
the letter and the spirit of the GPL. I'm surprised to hear that the FSF
appears to be doing the same thing! I'd always thought that if I looked
for it, I could get the absolutely latest, untested, broken version of
GCC, and that if I used it it would probably not work. I don't see why
that's any worse than having a bug that I try to fix, distribute patches
to other people having the problem, and then find out that I fixed it
the wrong way, or in a way that is going to cause problems with later
"official" patches or updates. In fact, isn't that one of the major
arguments the FSF is always defending against ("but if we distribute
sources to our product, people will make changes to it and may break
it or add incompatibilities")? I don't understand why one argument is
valid and the other is not.