[Fedora-marketing-list] Derivate distributions and GPL

[Rahul <sundaram fedoraproject org>]

Hi


"The article revealed that many distributions' maintainers were 
erroneously assuming that they did not need to provide source 
repositories for packages they did not modify, so long as the original 
upstream distribution did provide the source code. This responsibility 
is by no means new, but seems to have been widely overlooked. David 
Turner, GPL compliance officer at the Free Software Foundation, 
suggested that these distros might come into compliance by making some 
arrangement with the upstream supplier.

Turner's suggestion was rejected by Max Spevack, Fedora Board chair, 
partly because of the possible expense, but chiefly because it might 
encourage forking and leave the upstream distribution open to legal 
liability for the downstream one."

http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/07/2044245&from=rss

Not sure how a agreement with upstream would encourage forking. Max, can 
you expand on that?

Needless to say, a better working arrangement with derivative 
distributions is pretty important for Fedora. We have a number of Fedora 
derivatives out there that could be doing interesting modifications that 
we need to look at.


Rahul