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flotzamyesterday at 11:07 PM1 replyview on HN

> We didn't have git tags when GPL was written in 1989

The GPLv2 requires "a medium customarily used for software interchange", not "a medium customarily used in 1989 for software interchange". Customs are the customs of the time someone is releasing the work.


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phireyesterday at 11:26 PM

“a medium customarily used for software interchange“

Interesting choice of cropping for that quote.

If you had included the previous word, it would be blindly obvious that “on a medium“ is only talking about the transport layer, not the format of the data. So it would exclude distributing source code on tape, or even optical discs, as nobody uses those anymore. About the only medium used for source code distribution these days is “the internet”

You could potentially stretch this to excluding google drive, though google will argue that the medium is http, not google drive; But you can’t stretch this to requiring it be formatted as git.

And even if you did manage to successfully argue that, google would just ship it as one (tagged) commit per release. The history would still be missing.

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