On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Roy Bamford <neddyseag...@gentoo.org> wrote: > The GPL obliges us to keep such patches around for three years, iirc. > Don't we do that ?
Why? We own the copyright on the patches (to whatever degree that they're copyrightable), so we don't need a license to distribute them. If somebody else wants to redistribute our patches they need our permission or they need to comply with whatever license we issue them under (likely the same as the upstream license so that our users don't have bindist issues). The only thing we might need a license to redistribute are the parts of the patch that we didn't change, and upstream already provides those. I don't think patches are a derivative work. The result of applying the patches to the original source is a derivative work, but we don't distribute that - it only exists in a user's /var/tmp. At least, that's my understanding of copyright. Rich
