[Asterisk-Dev] GPL Violation http://www.asteriskwin32.com/

[Steve Kann]

Bob Goddard wrote:

>On Tuesday 12 April 2005 14:13, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
>  
>
>>On Tue, 12 Apr 2005, Derek Smithies wrote:
>>    
>>
>>> The question is: has the guy sold product?
>>>
>>>If he is still developing, but not sold product, then fine.
>>>  There is no GPL violation.
>>>
>>>If he is still developing, and has sold product, then there is a
>>>possible violation.
>>>
>>>You see, suppose he has been required to write Makefiles and configure
>>>commands to get it to work (but not changed the asterisk source) he is
>>>not required to release.
>>>      
>>>
>>Wrong. This has absolutely nothing to do about software being 'sold'. And
>>it also has nothing to do with 'additions vs modifications'.
>>
>>He distributes binaries. Binaries contain GPL'd code. Thus, he must
>>provide *all* of the source code necessary to build his binaries, yes,
>>that would include his Makefiles and whatever else.
>>    
>>
>
>No, he must proved all patches to those who got the software from him.
>  
>
Where does it say that in the GPL?  Why are people so misinformed about 
this?  The GPL isn't really that long..

=====
  3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
    source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
    1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
    years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
    cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
    machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
    distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
    customarily used for software interchange; or,

    c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
    to distribute corresponding source code.  (This alternative is
    allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
    received the program in object code or executable form with such
    an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it.  For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable.  However, as a
special exception, the source code distributed need not include
anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component
itself accompanies the executable.

=====

In this case, the "source code" includes not only his modified version 
of asterisk, but also the source code to whatever parts of cygwin he is 
distributing or linking to, since cygwin is also GPL.

It would also include the source code (or maybe only the object code?) 
for the cygwin development environment, since the cygwin compiler is not 
"normally distributed [..] witht he major components [..] of the 
operating system [Windows] on which the executable runs".

But, all this is not really that onerous:  All he needs to do is:

1) cd <directory with his source>; tar cvzf 
/tmp/asterisk-win32-some-version.tar.gz source-dir; scp 
/tmp/asterisk-win32-some-version.tar.gz webserver:place

2) wget http://www.cygwin.com/<cygwin-stuff>; scp -r <cygwin-stuff> 
webserver:place.

-SteveK