On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 7:35 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 6:06 PM Thomas Mueller <mueller6...@twc.com> wrote: >> >> [..] >> I remember there was a DR-DOS 8 that used GPL parts from FreeDOS, but that >> had to be withdrawn from the market due to legal challenges, using >> open-source GPL parts in a closed-source system. >> > > Yes, I was one of the folks who contacted them about it at the time. I posted > a newsitem to the FreeDOS website at the time, to document my interaction > with them. http://www.freedos.org/history/press/2005-drdos.txt > > I didn't mind that they included FreeDOS programs in DR-DOS. That's fine. But > I objected that they did so without providing the source code. They did not > follow the GNU GPL; they either had to provide the source code for the GNU > GPL'd programs, or they had to provide a written offer to do so. That's > defined in section 3 of the GNU GPL version 2.
I went around this on the Cygwin list years back. An open source developer using Cygwin wondered if he was required by the GPL to bundle source* with* his executables. My take, which a couple of Cygwin maintainers agreed with, was "No. You do not have to bundle source with your binaries. But you must make the source available, *state* you will, and specify how to get it." (The latter was likely a digital download of a source archive.) But it was a bit more complicated than that, because a requirement was that the end user must be able to get your source, reproduce your documented build environment, and build binaries on thier system that would be *identical* to the ones you supplied. So the source you made available had to be the exact version of the source you used to build the binaries you supplied. You could not simply point to your repository to get the source, because you may well have made changes since you released your binaries and grabbing whatever the current source was would not work. > Jim ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
