RMS has picked up the second point of my GPL v3 draft 1 comments (yes, I’m sure a lot of other people made it too), and it will now be permissible to allow source download for binaries distributed on physical media.
However, we’re now considering a major change in this policy. The coming draft of GPL version 3 will propose a new alternative allowing, for the first time, distribution of binaries on physical media and providing the source code over the network. This will require a commitment to keep the corresponding source code version available on a network server for three years.
Wahey :-)
Does “providing the source code over the network” explicitly require some sort of quality guarantee of the “available”?
Also, does “providing the source code over the network” mean a direct link to the source code (not easy, since it likely is more than a single file (unless it’s in a .tar or similar open-source archive format), or (potentially) click-thru via multiple advertisement-laden pages or only via a proprietary compression archive format?
Middle ground is via an ftp site in .tar.gz format, but I don’t think a liscence should get bogged down into the details of distribution.
We’ll have to see what language they come up with. I’m confident this can be well-worded to achieve the right thing.