Re: Q: whald should I give my "customers" ?

[Martin Guy <martinwguy at gmail dot com>]

On 31/12/2013, Mau Z <zmau1962@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have no  problems with licenses (all in the same city).

You may not, but the GNU foundation and your customers may!

If you give executables of GPL-ed software to people, you must also
make available to them the sources used to created those binaries: the
tarballs of the binutils, gcc, glibc sources and, of course, of the
build system used to compile them (crosstool-ng).

That is the *letter* of the law. The *spirit* of the law is to put the
users of the software in a position to rebuild the software they are
using from source, exactly the same way that you did, so that they can
fix bugs, make modifications, reconfigure and so on.

In practice I have knowingly broken the letter of the GPL in the past,
by distributing patch sets to GCC or crosstool and the resulting
cross-compiler binaries, since the patches and build system were a few
K, the full sources were hundreds of megabytes and my inet connection
was from home at a few 10s of K per second.
  In theory you should offer to provide the sources yourself. In
practice, supplying build instructions for publicly-available packages
such as unmodified crosstool-ng and the things it downloads seems to
be acceptable.  It certainly achieves the goal of the GPL, which is to
give the users freedom.

Cheers

    M

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