amicus_curious wrote:
The test would be where an infringing vendor is ordered by the
> court to disclose the changes made to the GPL source and not > offered voluntarily.
I don't believe this can happen. Someone infringing on the license can be ordered to stop infringing, and to pay statutory and actual damages. If they don't want to disclose their changes they don't have to, but then they don't get to copy and distribute.
It would seem more logical to simply point to the original so that version control is obtained. If there are multiple souces of some source, who is guarantee that all are updated concurrently? With the plethora of versions that usually emanate from and OSS project, I would consider this to be a goal rather than a violation of the GPL.
The source provided to users must be exactly the source used to build the version of the program they receive. That insures that users can read the program they have. Certainly the creators of the program are free to go beyond that base requirement, but the base requirement must be met. One reason is that source code is changed over time. Absent the GPL's requirements a user who has received a copy of a program and sometime afterward wants to read it could find that the version available no longer matched his.
That still seems rather insane.
Different people have different goals. People who do not share the goals enforced by the GPL ought not to distribute their work using it. But they should expect that people who do share the goals of the GPL will ignore their work. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss