A GPL requirement could have a chilling effect on derivative distros

Posted by dcparris on Jun 27, 2006 10:11 PM EDT
NewsForge; By Bruce Byfield
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Warren Woodford, the founder of the MEPIS distribution, would prefer to be concentrating on polishing his latest release. Instead, he is distracted by an official notice from the Free Software Foundation that, because MEPIS has not previously supplied source code for the packages already available from the distribution it is based on -- once Debian, and now Ubuntu -- it is in violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Woodford intends to comply, but he worries about how this requirement might affect all distributions derived from other distributions -- especially those run by one or two people in their spare time.

[Give me a break! If Red Hat, Mandriva and Debian all have to offer source code, then why would the downstream developers think they are any different? Where do the "upstream distros get their code from? Hmm? I don't see the concern. - dcparris]

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simple solution tbuitenh 11 1,077 Jun 29, 2006 11:55 PM

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