On Sun, 2010-01-03 at 09:55 -0500, Paul Davis wrote: > On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Bob Ham <[email protected]> wrote: > > It's good to see that the source code is publicly available but I'm > > still concerned that Harrison customers might not be told that they have > > access to it. I could find no mention whatsoever of source code on > > their website. According to the GPL 2, they must necessarily provide > > along with their binaries, either the source code itself or a written > > offer to provide the source code. Is this happening? > > > > Again, the concern here is that there may be Harrison customers who are > > not being made aware that they have access to the source code for the > > software they're buying. > > The software does not differ from Ardour in any way that is related to > "GPL compliance". It prints the same messages,
That, at least is good to know. > and is covered by same > license. Nobody who downloads Ardour from http://ardour.org/download > will see any extra indication of their rights under the GPL over those > seen by a Mixbus customer, and neither will anyone who obtains Ardour > from their Linux distribution. If you're going to get upset by Mixbus, > then lets please start first with what happens when someone downloads > Ardour from a Ubuntu repository. Well, to compare Mixbus and Ubuntu, I would look at these pages: 1. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/developerzone which explains to users that they are welcome to participate in development and provides pointers to specific information; 2. https://launchpad.net/ardour which contains links to the Ardour home page and Ubuntu source code packages; and 3. http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/a/ardour/ which offers both binaries and source code (this is equivalent to distributing the source code along with the binaries in the GPL 2.) I would say that Canonical are doing their best to *encourage* customers to contribute to Ardour and complying with the GPL. On the other hand, the complete absence of information on contributing to Ardour or accessing the source code for the Free parts of Mixbus seems quite like a GPL violation. Bear in mind that the GPL 2 was written in the days when software distribution was often by means such as sending magnetic tapes in the mail. The inclusion of a slip of paper saying that source code was also available was a significant thing. Note that this slip of paper would have to have been included regardless of any messages that the software itself displayed. Now bring things forward to the days of 'Web 2.0' and paid-for downloads and you can see that Canonical seem to be making an effort to comply with the GPL. Harrison, on the other hand seem to be making no such effort. As for people downloading from ardour.org, that site *hosts* the source code! -- Bob Ham <[email protected]> for (;;) { ++pancakes; }
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
