Re: Monta Vista software license terms

[Hugo Mills <hugo-lkml@carfax.org.uk>]

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On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 06:56:28PM +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 01:54:36PM -0500, Dana Lacoste wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 13:15, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > 
> > > Blah.  Why can't mvista put up the source to their products on some ftp
> > > server like suse/redhat/caldera/mandrake/etc??  That's the whole point of
> > > this discussion.  mvista doesn't do anything illegal, but they certainly
> > > don't play nice.
> > 
> > The source code is available to those with the binaries,
> > just as the GPL requires.  AFAIK everyone's said so far
> > that they not only meet the GPL requirements they feed
> > the changes they do make back to the community as well
> > as to their customers.
> 
> everyone including me, right.   I can't force them, but I can be pissed
> if they don't play nice.  And I am.

   I fail to see any unfairness in their methods. They fulfil their
requirements under the GPL, providing the source to their customers.
They feed back relevant and useful changes they have made to the
sources to the main development effort -- which is not a requirement
under the GPL. I would suggest that this latter effort -- which is
probably significantly _more_ effort than shoving a tarball on an FTP
server somewhere -- is precisely "playing nice", and probably a lot
more helpful to the community than simply handing you a source
tarball. It has at least the advantage that the minority-interest
hacks don't get mixed up with the important mainstream(*) changes.

   If you want to see the full and exact source for the MV products,
you can always either (a) obtain a binary distribution from MV, which
then entitles you to a copy of the relevant source, or (b) find
someone who already has a copy of that source, and ask them nicely for
it.

   Given your comments about the MV source code in a previous email,
I'm not sure why you want to see it anyway, if it's as bad as you
claim.

   Hugo.

(*) Mainstream for the appropriate problem space.

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