Florian Weimer wrote: > As Bruce said, you have to to prepare the source code release as part of > the release process for the binaries.
That's absolutely correct, and I agree with Bruce's point quoted below: >> All of the mechanism to provide source must be in place before the >> binary goes out. >> Under the terms of the GPL, the acceptable delay is zero. It indeed concerns me greatly that companies have a tendency to do what I call "offer-fail" violations, where they have an offer for source out there with the binaries, but when you request the source, they take months to get you source code and it clearly doesn't build at all when you get it. That shows pretty clearly that they were just not in compliance from the start and made the offer as a cover-up of their violation. > There have been cases where the FSF has approved a delay in publishing > source code. I wonder if you're conflating here issues of general licensing policy with GPL enforcement policy. For example, a classic example of FSF's stance on general licensing policy about "publishing delay of source" is the case of Aladdin Ghostscript (proprietary) delay-released release as GNU Ghostscript under GPL. Situations like that are a question of good policy generally for Free Software, but not related to license violation. Since Aladdin was the 100% copyright holder of Ghostscript at the time, there was no GPL violation by Aladdin's proprietary version. So, that has nothing to do with GPL enforcement policy, since Aladdin didn't violate GPL. -- bkuhn
