Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[mdw@venus.ebi.ac.uk (Mark Wooding)]

Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

> 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

Which GPL did you read?  The one I've got here says:

  3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

    ...

    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
    years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
    cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
    machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
    distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
    customarily used for software interchange; or,

    ...

The `cost of physically performing source distribution' sounds a good
deal less than `reasonable, where the only person who gets to complain
about reasonable is the copyright holder' to me.  Perhaps this is just
me getting things wrong, but charging much more than media and postage
costs for a source distribution looks like a violation of the licence to
me.

I suspect that the intent behind the words of this particular section is
to ensure that once you've got a distribution of GPL-ed-program `foo' of
any kind, you shouldn't have to pay any more for the /right/ to have the
sources for `foo', but only for the physical process of getting hold of
the appropriate data.  (This is dangerous territory, and I know it:
trying to read between the lines of a document as carefully worded as
the GPL is tricky.)
-- 
[mdw]

`It can't rain all the time.'
		-- Eric Draven