alt Hacker NewsIf distributing under 3(b) then it's legitimate to only supply source on request. Historically source has been distributed without revision control history or metadata and been considered acceptable (the source tarballs on gnu.org are snapshots, for instance) so I think the preferred form argument is also tricky. I agree that there's huge value in having the individual commits, but from a GPL perspective we had this argument when Red Hat started flattening all patches in the RHEL kernel source 15 years ago.
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I've been wondering about the Red Hat model! Seems like so much of modern development involves git blame or whatever to make sense of how the code came to be, and sometimes rule out an "obvious" modification that actually turns out to be a bad idea now that you know the historical context.
GrapheneOS might have a better case though if it's not just about understanding the code but about how the Android build system expects that everything is in Git.
we could argue about license semantics all day, either way Google is not being a good player
When the build system expects a certain metadata which is removed by the force pushes or tag removal, then that is arguably not the preferred form. Grapheneos notes this elsewhere in the thread. [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49368983