GPL and storage requirements

[Matt Domsch]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 09:31:43AM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> 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.

It's both.  The Fedora master storage boxes are at capacity now, and
getting sufficient additional storage in each of the 3 data centers
has so far been problematic.

 
> [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.]

It's crossed my mind, but I'd prefer if we could get such donated
rather than paid-for given we don't know how many folks could wind up
downloading it thus how much it would cost us.


> >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.

If we (Fedora and all its public mirrors) aren't under 3(a), then we
probably need to keep all SRPMS for all updates ever published too,
which I'm not sure we do presently (we might, I just don't know - that
may be a feature of the build system).  We wouldn't have to keep them
online live for the mirrors necessarily, but would have to make them
available "on demand" via the written offer, which is in the docs
files at the top of every CD/DVD produced for a while.

I've thought, and again, IANAL, that Fedora is covered by 3(a) because
we distribute source and binaries concurrently.  If that isn't
sufficient because mirrors exist, wow...

-Matt