On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 08:53:40PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> > I can pull single files off the FSF's ftp archive and not
> > download the COPYING file. Is the FSF in violation as well? We
> > seem to be in august company, then.
> LOL. Are you speaking of ftp.gnu.org? I don't think you *can* pull
> single files off that site; it only contains complete tarballs of
> source.
Well, it's not an individual file, per se, but you can download:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-19.10-19.11.diff.gz
and get a complete copy of emacs-19.10/lisp/cookie1.el without also
getting a complete copy of the GPL. Note that cookie1.el does include
``a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
under the terms of this General Public License'' and is thus a Program
for the purposes of section 1.
> Perhaps you're referring to the CVS servers and things like that, but
> that's an odd kind of comparison.
Why? Are individual source files not worth having? Are they not equally
covered by the GPL?
> People are told, in many and
> various contexts, that an individual .deb is a good thing to have,
> which they can fetch and install on many systems, including non-Debian
> ones, including non-Linux ones, in fact.
And people can download emacs-19.10-19.11.diff.gz on non GNU systems too.
What non-Linux system are you talking about, exactly, anyway? FreeBSD,
eg, includes gcc in it's standard install (so presumably all FreeBSD
users will have a copy of the GPL somewhere about if they need it), and
when you add linux compatability it also includes (amongst other things)
fileutils with a copy of its COPYING file.
Surely the FSF has better things to do?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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