Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[ted@telematics.com (Ted Goldblatt)]

In article <dewar.873499941@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Ted said
>
><<The GNU source is not installed by default, and I'll admit that it
>isn't obvious how to find it (I had to call WRS customer support to
>get the instructions).
[snip]
>One could easily argue that they made this harder
>to find than it should be (I did to the customer support person), but
>it is definitely there.>>

>"harder to find than it should be"
>
>By what standards, the GPL does not say that it has to be super easy to
>get the sources, the only restriction it places is that you cannot charge
>more than a copying fee for them, but it would certainly be in bounds to
>say that the sources are available on request on CD ROM for a payment of
>$X with a delivery time of Y weeks (as long as X and Y were reasonable,
>where the only person who gets to complain about reasonable is the
>copyright holder -- that's important to realize, as with any copyrighted
>work, it is the copyright holder who has the sole course of action here.
>If you find something you don't like about the way someone is handling
>some GPL'ed software, you should complain to the copyright holder, who
>may or may not agree that there is a problem, and may or may not do
>something about it.

You may have missed an earlier article in this thread.  Wind River doesn't
say that "the sources are available on request on CD ROM for a payment of
$X", they _include_ the sources on the normal Tornado release CDROM.  By
"harder than it should be", I meant that they neglected to say this, or
to say how you install them from the CDROM, in any of the release notes
or installation documentation.  This may actually be an accidental violation
of the GPL, but that's irrelevant.  I was not accusing WRS of violating the
GPL - if anything, I was defending them from such a charge.  However, their
oversight (I'll assume it was such) actually was a problem _for WRS_, since
I (and I assume others) were forced to call their customer service line to
get the info, and such calls cost them money.  So it is really in their
(WRS's) best interest to make this "easy".

ted
-- 
Ted Goldblatt    Ted.Goldblatt@telematics.com     (954) 351-4367
    Telematics Intl., Inc.   Ft. Lauderdale, FL