On Jun 14, 2007, Daniel Hazelton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thursday 14 June 2007 17:27:27 Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> On Jun 14, 2007, Daniel Hazelton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > <somewhat sarcastic> >> > And the companies that produce devices that come with Linux and/or >> > other GPL'd software installed and place limits such that only >> > people that have purchased that hardware have access to the >> > "modified" source running on the device are following the letter, >> > and the spirit, of the GPL. >> >> WAIT, WAIT, THAT'S... :-) >> >> > Before you start yelling I'm wrong, think about it this way: they >> > make the source available to the people that they've given binary >> > versions to, and there is nothing stopping one of those people from >> > making the source available to the rest of the world. >> >> The *only* in your sentence betrayed you. >> >> If they place the limits such that nobody else can access the sources, >> they're in violation of the license.
> Nope. There is *NO* requirement *ANYWHERE* in the GPL, no matter the version, > that says you have to *DISTRIBUTE* the source to *ANYONE* except those that > you have given a binary to. Go read the licenses. I agree. I even said so. But the *only* gave me the impression that you were talking about magic, or any other sufficiently advanced technology ;-), that would enable the recipients to get the source code, but not usefully pass it on. > That is *EXACTLY* what a number of companies have done - Acer (yes, > the laptop company) has done that. They sell laptops running Linux, > but unless you have purchased one of them you can't download the > sources (or even replacement binaries) for the version of linux they > put on their machines. (From Acer, that is) That's the sort of stuff that breaks the tit-for-tat premise. GPL indeed is not concerned about tit-for-tat. It's concerned about respect for the freedoms. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED], gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist [EMAIL PROTECTED], gnu.org} - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/