Re: [9fans] licence question

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

> Maybe I misunderstood something about licensing stuff but, can't you just
> distribute the working build product (binaries etc, without source) to
> the TV set (or kiosk) and keep the source in a completely separate open
> space, under some open source license? I mean, does open source (gpl,
> mit) mean, you have to distribute the source in the same device?

No, you're correct. It can be distributed separately, even "on
request" is good enough to comply with gpl it seems.
And then practically it's even possible to ignore people and still not
share a bit, as countless companies show over and over again.
And then you can just run the software yourself and not even give the
binaries to anybody, instead they get a locked down horrible web
interface, and nobody can even ASK for the software and so you never
even get a valid request and nobody will ever know what GPL code you
use.
I.E. GPL is rather useless nowadays.

Still there's a value of distributing the source with the binaries:
user friendliness. As demonstrated by Plan9. As I already said.
The value of this is huge and it would be sad to see somebody give it
up just to save a few bytes.
Binaries, Source, Compilers, Documentation, for *all* target
platforms. Where else do you get this all in one like this? It's sadly
very unique to Plan9.

Of course this is completely separate from the license. I have never
seen a license state that you shouldn't make your user's life
miserable. Not like it's any more enforceable than the GPL, but it
would certainly be more amusing, which would be the point.

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