On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 02:18:19AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > We can only enforce it if we ship the license with > the package. If you want to be clever about this, I'll not follow you, as I > think this is not only asking for legal problems but also bad for the > reputation of Debian.
Suppose I take a (fully GPL compliant) source package, unpack it, and place the unpacked files on an ftp site. A user could download a GPLed file without downloading the license if they wished to. I have still shipped the GPL license (it's available from the same ftp site), the user did not accept delivery. Even a single archive file could be partially downloaded, and miss the GPL license. Too specific an interpretation could ban us from shipping anything, because downloads are not guaranteed to be atomic operations. -Drake
