Octave-forge and legal issues

[Quentin Spencer]

Matthew Miller wrote:

>On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 05:23:09PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>  
>
>>>>2. Create a modified source tarball with the offending code removed. 
>>>>This would be easy, but the source wouldn't match the upstream source.
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>This has already been done for some packages (e.g. xmms, gstreamer-
>>>plugins), and AFAIK is acceptable.
>>>      
>>>
>>... unless the sources are GPL'ed. Not shipping the original sources
>>would violate the GPL.
>>    
>>
>
>Um, if they're not commercially-distributable, they're not GPL'd. I don't
>see anything in the GPL that says you must distribute the sources in the
>exact same tarball as comes from upstream -- in fact, part of the point of
>the GPL is that you *don't* have to do that.
>  
>
This is all true...

I hope all of you are discussing this hypothetically at this point and 
not in regards to octave-forge. This is a dead issue with regard to 
octave-forge because the original GPL label in the spec file was based 
on an erroneous assumption by the packager who is very embarrased by his 
mistake and has corrected it :) (See my previous post on this).