On Sat, Aug 31, 2002 at 07:08:56PM +1200, Nick Phillips wrote: > I knew someone would come up with that. There is however no other reasonable > interpretation of the GPL possible. > > If you take your argument to its logical conclusion then I can immediately > prevent you from distributing, say, gcc by going through the sources, > improving the comments, and refusing to distribute my new version at all.
No. "Preferred form for modification" is not "preferred version for modification". If we both have a copy of unobfuscated GCC source, and yours has better comments, we both still have it in the same form: unobfuscated C. You just happen to have a better version. Your "available" would undermine the GPL. If I opted not to download source when downloading a GPL binary, and the source becomes unavailable, I could say that the source is not available to me and distribute the binaries. I could do the same if I lost it, and maybe even if I was under NDA. (It's not available! It's secret!) The GPL is designed to prevent you from distributing binaries at all if you can't also distribute source. -- Glenn Maynard