[sldev] GPL issues....

[Gareth Nelson]

[gareth at lovely ~]$ ls -loh ~/slviewer*.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 gareth 110M Mar 29 09:29
/home/gareth/slviewer-linux-libs-Branch_1-19-1-Viewer-r83294.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 gareth  30M Mar 29 09:21
/home/gareth/slviewer-src-Branch_1-19-1-Viewer-r83294.tar

This is uncompressed, the 3rd-party libs need not be redistributed (or
at least the binary portions need not be) either, only the source
tarball. It's perfectly feasible to distribute the source tree.

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Marine Kelley <marinekelley at gmail.com> wrote:
> In an ideal world, an open-source dev releases their binaries AND the EXACT
> source code and makefiles to reproduce the EXACT same binary. Why ? Just so
> the end-user can check that the binaries they downloaded are exactly what is
> advertised with an MD5 hash or some other signature. It is all too easy to
> distribute flawed binaries (with a little keylogger here, a short dial home
> there) and clean source code along with it. Most people tend to think that
> "this is ok" to download a binary if the provided source code seems clean,
> but it's like agreeing to buy a house just from the pictures.
>
> Unfortunately this is not possible with the SL viewer. Far too clumsy,
> maintaining a custom viewer over different SL versions is already quite
> tedious. Some parts of the SL viewer are not even open-source, and a full
> viewer compressed is 60Mb compared to just 6Mb for just a compressed exe
> (which is only what the user needs). So try to enforce that and the number
> of custom viewers around will be dramatically reduced. Only companies would
> be able to maintain that, and to me it's the contrary of the goal of
> open-sourcing a product.
>
> Marine
>
>
>
> 2008/8/16 Gareth Nelson <gareth at litesim.com>
>>
>> Who said anything about sueing? I wouldn't even have standing to sue,
>> since I haven't got any patches in the viewer (the reason for this by
>> the way is in fact the contributor agreement - otherwise i'd be a hell
>> of a lot more active with viewer development).
>>
>> I also stated that i'm "not as concerned about" Nicholaz since he's a
>> decent guy, not "it's fine for him to violate the license because he's
>> a decent guy". I haven't yet bothered to contact Nicholaz simply
>> because I doubt he'd really respond in the same arrogant manner Henri
>> has. Henri's response was literally to state that the viewer isn't
>> GPLed, but his patches are. If the attitude is that it's fine for him
>> to claim this, then  fair enough - I won't bother. However, let that
>> meme get spread around and it'll be a ticking timebomb to more serious
>> violations.
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Darien Caldwell
>> <darien.caldwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I know i'm going to get dogpiled for saying this, but wouldn't be the
>> > first time. :)
>> >
>> > Sit back and think about what you are saying. You want to sue someone,
>> > because you don't want to have to patch the source yourself.  Think
>> > about the level of ridiculousness in what you are doing. If he wasn't
>> > distributing his changes, that's one thing. But this, is truely
>> > something else.
>> >
>> > And the statement that it's okay for Nicholaz to not distribute full
>> > sources because he is a 'decent guy', but for Henri, it's not, speaks
>> > to your true intentions.
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