On Sunday 16 July 2006 04:06, Rahul <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > "The article revealed that many distributions' maintainers were > erroneously assuming that they did not need to provide source > repositories for packages they did not modify, so long as the original > upstream distribution did provide the source code. This responsibility > is by no means new, but seems to have been widely overlooked. David > Turner, GPL compliance officer at the Free Software Foundation, > suggested that these distros might come into compliance by making some > arrangement with the upstream supplier. > > Turner's suggestion was rejected by Max Spevack, Fedora Board chair, > partly because of the possible expense, but chiefly because it might > encourage forking and leave the upstream distribution open to legal > liability for the downstream one." > > http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/07/2044245&from=rss > > Not sure how a agreement with upstream would encourage forking. Max, can > you expand on that? > > Needless to say, a better working arrangement with derivative > distributions is pretty important for Fedora. We have a number of Fedora > derivatives out there that could be doing interesting modifications that > we need to look at. > There's a significant difference between derivative distributions and third-party repositories. Most of the projects that use Fedora Core as a base are third-party repositories. The derivatives are true forks, and are not something we want to get tied to supporting, even though we certainly don't mind enabling them. The Fedora Project's code will remain freely available for the foreseeable future, but there's no reason for us to take responsibility for providing that source to keep a downstream distribution GPL compliant. If we enter into an agreement with downstream distributions, we could end up being responsible if changes in our code provisions result in those downstream distributions being in violation of the GPL. If we do make an open agreement to provide the code for downstream distributions, it becomes almost as easy to handle a downstream distribution as to host a third-party repository. Since a third-party repository would be more restricted than another distribution, lazy packagers that want to casually modify Fedora Core could end up forking it. Forcing them to maintain their own code repositories raises the bar to a point where those packagers would have to make a real commitment before forking. -- Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes nman64@xxxxxxxxx http://www.n-man.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nman64 Have I been helpful? Rate my assistance! http://rate.affero.net/nman64/ --
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