Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 19:51 +0100, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
GPLv2 3b/c says you put out an offer in which the instructions are to
obtain the sources and that any non-commercial party can forward that
offer.
The concern is that depending on the legal interpretation of 3b and 3c
of the GPL, the clock may restart on every redistribution. So, we host a
release of Fedora for 3 years, then take it down, but on the day before
we do, someone else redistributes it and then asks us to honor our "3
years worth of source" promise, since for them, it hasn't been three
years since their initial date of redistribution.
The GPL is painfully vague on what it means here, hence Jesse's (and
historically, Red Hat Legal's) instinct to avoid invoking this.
GPLv2 doesn't say though that once the binary is released originally,
the clock starts ticking all over again each time it is redistributed by
a third party that uses 3c. A written offer can easily contain a time
frame consistent with the three years described in the license, possibly
extended to 3 years + a release's lifecycle.
If this is really so much of a concern, we wouldn't have released any
live media until we cleared this -or we are potentially stabbing
ourselves in the back by not being (entirely) GPL compliant in this aspect.
Either we investigate what is (or is not) possible under GPLv2 3b/c or
GPLv3 6-, or we should just say "no" -in which case someone else might
pick this up and re-distribute Fedora (almost entirely) under GPLv2 3b.
-Jeroen
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