Fedora Board Recap 2007-NOV-13

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

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