From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 1025b4,1d8ab55e71d08f3d X-Google-Attributes: gid1025b4,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,1efdd369be089610 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: what DOES the GPL really say? Date: 1997/09/05 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 269999640 References: <5ph4g5$sbs$1@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <5uhe6s$g8q@taurus.ftl.telematics.com> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss Date: 1997-09-05T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Hwa-Jin Bae wrote: >In practice, the whole GPL issue seems to be pointless. >For example, Wind River Systems, a maker of VxWorks >ships modified versions of GDB as part of their >Tornado products. Does anyone outside Wind River Systems >have source code for this special version of GDB? Nope. >Do they make it avaialble as part of normal GDB release? >Nope. Does Cygnus (who did the work under contract to >Wind River) make an issue of this fact? nope. This is complete nonsense as far as I can determine. Certainly everyone I know in the free software business takes the GPL very seriously, and any allegations to the contrary need substantiation rather than vague claims like the above. The Free Software Foundation, which holds the copyright in this case (rather than Cygnus) would certainly pursue any such violations of the GPL. But in this case, the sources are most definitely available according to the requirements of the GPL, so there is no problem. Please note that the GPL does NOT require that the sources be made available for free downloading or anything like that. It is quite OK for example to make sources available only on diskettes, and to charge a copying fee for them.