[sldev] GPL issues....

Marine Kelley marinekelley at gmail.com
Sun Aug 17 10:59:44 PDT 2008


>
>
> >> Distributing patches is insufficient:
> >>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributingSourceIsInconvenient
>


I'm not questioning the GPL or anything, but isn't that a bit clumsy for the
dev ? This FAQ says, roughly, that if in one year from now someone wants to
download the source code of the present binaries, nothing guarantees me that
the website I'm relying on right now will still provide the sources in a
year.

The way I understand it is this :
- I am relying on LL to provide the source code for me when I release a new
version of my viewer
- This is wrong because nothing tells me that in one year LL will still
provide any source code, let alone that particular source code I have used
to compile the viewer I am providing now
- But in one year, the SL viewer will have changed and improved a bit (I
hope), the version of the sources and binaries will be different

Does that mean that I have to publish the patched SL source code along with
my binaries, keeping all the versions in an repository (SVN or others) ad
vitam aeternam ? Or am I allowed to remove the source code for viewers that
I do not provide anymore ?

Because in the case of the second option, then this does not really impact
most custom viewers since as soon as LL stops providing their source code we
will stop providing custom viewers (granted, there would be some inertia
until SL becomes totally incompatible). In other words, we can rely on LL
for the source code because custom viewers will die with it.

Not sure if I'm clear.
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