On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 08:23:18PM -0000, Christian Falch wrote: > About the patch/diff-question, read the following section from the GPL FAQ: [...] > The essence of it is "You need to provide complete sources, not just diffs, > with the binaries. "
I don't mean to be pedantic, but since I myself do precisely this at http://prc-tools.sourceforge.net/, I think it would be good if my boss knew that it was legal. :-) Before I started producing prc-tools binaries, I distributed only source patches (this was back in the 0.5.1a3 days). Now that I also distribute binaries, I need to provide *complete* source code to those binaries. Hence I now provide the original GCC, etc, tarballs to which the patches apply as well as the patches themselves. This is what that FAQ entry is referring to. I think it's fair to say that providing binaries and patches, but omitting the upstream base packages, is within the spirit of "make the source code available". However it's clearly against the letter of the GPL, and there are good pragmatic reasons why it's substandard, as explained in that FAQ. Thus it's a mistake that should be corrected when it occurs. But this is not a problem with prc-tools at SourceForge, nor, apparently, with Sony-Poser (which apparently has much more serious problems -- so let's shout at them some more, that's sure to help :-)). It is OTOH yet another of the problems with the http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/gcc/ page. That page violates the GPL with respect to both prc-tools and Cygwin. John -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
