FS/OSS license: not quite enough of a requirement

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Thu May 10 21:18:13 UTC 2007


On May  9, 2007, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:

> On May  9, 2007, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>>> Perhaps it would make sense to also add a note explaining that Fedora
>>> is committed to not distributing [non-firmware] software in such a way
>>> that the software wouldn't abide by these definitions, from the point
>>> of view of the recipients.  E.g. software licensed under a Free
>>> Software license but without corresponding sources.  If the reader
>>> finds deviations s/he should report them.

>> Doesn't
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-c23c2cd3782be842dc7ab40c35199c07cfbfe347
>> already cover all that?

> At first, I almost agreed with it.  Sorry that I forgot we already had
> that bit.

And today I realized that's not quite enough to ensure that the *user*
receives the source code from us.  All that states is that *we* get
the source code.

So we could in theory accept Free Software, including source code,
under a liberal license, build it AFAICT in perfect accordance with
our guidelines, and distribute only its binaries to our users.

It's obvious to me that we're not going to do this.

But is it obvious for an outsider, who looks at us suspiciously?

That's the kind of public commitment that I'm looking for.  Something
that we can point suspicious outsiders to, to make it clear that we
are in fact committed to doing The Right Thing.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}




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