GPL and storage requirements

[Luis Villa]

On 3/25/07, Matt Domsch <matt at domsch.com> wrote:
> > No, that is what 3(c) is for. Only Fedora carries the long-term
> > storage requirements in that case. (And as far as I can see, if you're
> > still distributing FC1, Fedora has no problem with nearly indefinite
> > storage.)
>
> That's the problem.  We don't have infinite and indefinite storage,

Which 'we'? Fedora? or Fedora's mirrors? I guess I assumed the primary
goal here was to reduce demands on mirrors, not on Fedora.

[If disk for Fedora is really a serious problem, have you looked at
Amazon S3? For something that can't be downloaded very often (like FC1
source) I'd imagine it would be fairly cheap.]

> but folks have wanted to honor the GPL 3(b).  If it's 3 years after
> the last distribution of the binaries, then we should nuke the
> binaries ASAP and leave the source.  The SRPMS dir for FC1 is ~3GB,
> FC2 is ~3GB, FC3 is ~4.5GB, ...  However, if mirrors keep carrying
> FC(early) after we've deleted it, and they're using 3(b) and passing
> it on to us, don't we need to carry source until the last mirror
> doesn't?

My reading of Sec. 3 (IANAL, this is not a legal opinion, etc.) is
that Fedora's liability ends three years after Fedora stops
distributing, and that mirrors are not violating the terms if they
continue to distribute binaries once you've stopped distributing
source. They merely have to distribute your offer, even though it may
no longer be valid.

GPL v3 may actually be less clear on this particular point than v2;
I'll write an email to my GPL committee about that.

Luis

P.S. Why are mirrors still distributing completely unsupported,
security-nightmareish software like FC1? I have a feeling I've asked
this before, but humor me :)