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simonciontoday at 1:23 AM1 replyview on HN

> my phrasing ... is somewhat wrong

It's completely wrong.

> I stand by the position that all this doesn't seem very restrictive though.

Is your position that it's less restrictive than it needs to be?

If that's not your position, then I'm not at all sure why you're bringing this up. If that is your position, then I disagree with you. The entire point of the GPL is to require distributors to "share and share alike". It's not a "sue everyone into oblivion" license, it's a "don't be a fuckin asshole with this gift I gave you to use, inspect, and modify however you wish... pass it along to others under the same terms" license.


Replies

jraphtoday at 9:31 AM

I think you got me wrong.

I think the GPL doesn't impose much on how one should be redistributing the source code.

I'm not sure I would like it to me more restrictive, and I completely agree with your reading (starting from "The entire point of the GPL...").

> If that's not your position, then I'm not at all sure why you're bringing this up.

My initial reply to you was me mostly agreeing with you: distributing via Google Drive is probably not a violation of the letter of the GPL. Making it a pain to get the source code is an obvious violation of its spirit though (your "don't be a fuckin asshole" point).

>> my phrasing ... is somewhat wrong

> It's completely wrong.

Well, what concrete restriction you see in the GPL about how to redistribute the source code, apart from "you must make it available in a reasonable way (and tell people they can get it, the GPLv3 is more explicit about this but Android doesn't have GPLv3 code AFAIK)?"