GPL and storage requirements

[seth vidal]

On Sun, 2007-03-25 at 09:31 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 3/25/07, Matt Domsch <matt at domsch.com> wrote:
> > > No, that is what 3(c) is for. Only Fedora carries the long-term
> > > storage requirements in that case. (And as far as I can see, if you're
> > > still distributing FC1, Fedora has no problem with nearly indefinite
> > > storage.)
> >
> > That's the problem.  We don't have infinite and indefinite storage,
> 
> Which 'we'? Fedora? or Fedora's mirrors? I guess I assumed the primary
> goal here was to reduce demands on mirrors, not on Fedora.
> 
> [If disk for Fedora is really a serious problem, have you looked at
> Amazon S3? For something that can't be downloaded very often (like FC1
> source) I'd imagine it would be fairly cheap.]
> 
> > but folks have wanted to honor the GPL 3(b).  If it's 3 years after
> > the last distribution of the binaries, then we should nuke the
> > binaries ASAP and leave the source.  The SRPMS dir for FC1 is ~3GB,
> > FC2 is ~3GB, FC3 is ~4.5GB, ...  However, if mirrors keep carrying
> > FC(early) after we've deleted it, and they're using 3(b) and passing
> > it on to us, don't we need to carry source until the last mirror
> > doesn't?
> 
> My reading of Sec. 3 (IANAL, this is not a legal opinion, etc.) is
> that Fedora's liability ends three years after Fedora stops
> distributing, and that mirrors are not violating the terms if they
> continue to distribute binaries once you've stopped distributing
> source. They merely have to distribute your offer, even though it may
> no longer be valid.
> 
> GPL v3 may actually be less clear on this particular point than v2;
> I'll write an email to my GPL committee about that.
> 
> Luis
> 
> P.S. Why are mirrors still distributing completely unsupported,
> security-nightmareish software like FC1? I have a feeling I've asked
> this before, but humor me :)

mirrors are lazy. Unless upstream deletes it then they'll leave it
there. The mirrors just run something like:
 rsync -avH --delete-after /someplace/ dest/

If it's not deleted on the mirror master it won't be deleted for them.

The only time they delete stuff is when their monitoring software tells
them they are low on a disk space.

-sv