[MPlayer-dev-eng] violation of the GPL

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 05:24:26PM -0600, Joey Parrish wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I got an email from someone recently informing me that I am violating
> the GPL with concerns to MPlayer.
> 
> I don't distribute the full source on my cygwin MPlayer webpage, just
> a patchset.  This is because I don't want to keep up lots of big source
> archives that could get out of sync with MPlayer CVS.
> 
> Curtis Magyar says:
>  "I don't think your note that the source is available from mplayerhq is
> sufficient to satisfy your responsibility as far as the GPL is concerned."
> 
> And he sent me this link:
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributingSourceIsInconvenient
> 
> My questions are:
>  1) Do you (anyone) have a problem with my policy?
>  2) Can I be in violation of the GPL if the creators don't care?

I'm not terribly upset because I don't think you have any bad
intentions, but IMO it would be nice for you to remedy the situation.
Unless people know exactly which cvs revisions of all the files you
built from, it's very hard for them to get the right source to rebuild
the exact binaries you're distributing.

As far as I'm concerned you're one of the developers, and so even if
your binaries are hosted on a different server, it's probably ok as
long as the source is distributed from MPHQ and clearly linked at your
site. But in order for this to be the case, you need to be using
source from a snapshot/release which is being kept on MPHQ
indefinitely, or else you need to give the exact cvs commands to get
the exact cvs revision you used from MPHQ.

Of course if other developers want you to actually store entire
tarballs of the source with your patches at your website, then I think
you should probably do that too. But IMO as long as you're working
with us, you have what the FSF would call an agreement whereby MPHQ
distributes the source, and you're only under obligation to make it
available directly if that agreement is broken off later on.

Make sense?

Rich