Picking a license

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri May 14 20:24:56 EDT 2010


The following lines from

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html

seem to cover the case of someone who casually redistributes, for free, 
Ubuntu or whatever. Such can refer people back to the Ubuntu site. They 
should, perhaps, be familiar with the url, but I would expect that the 
binary Ubuntu distribution CDs have the appropriate offer and details on 
that disk. Someone who casually distributes, for free, a subset should 
also be covered. Under 4.1.2  Option (b): The Offer,

"The option to provide an offer for source rather than direct source 
distribution is a special benefit to companies equipped to handle a 
fulfillment process. GPLv2 § 3(c) and GPLv3 § 6(c) avoid burdening 
noncommercial, occasional redistributors with fulfillment request 
obligations by allowing them to pass along the offer for source as they 
received it.

Note that commercial redistributors cannot avail themselves of the 
option (c) exception, and so while your offer for source must be good to 
anyone who receives the offer (under v2) or the object code (under v3), 
it cannot extinguish the obligations of anyone who commercially 
redistributes your product. The license terms apply to anyone who 
distributes GPL’d software, "

Terry Jan Reedy





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