"The cipherfunk web site, which made extra packages available to Ubuntu and MEPIS users, was shut down in response to complaints from Ubuntu team members Matthew Garrett and Philipp Kern. It is my understanding they alleged that cipherfunk was not making modified GPLed source code available in a timely fashion. You can read about it the website." "Well, the GNU GPL states as part of Section 3 of the licence that I must provide source code on request for no more than the cost of physically performing the distribution. Given that the host this box is on actually costs me 110.95AUD every 30 days to run, 9.90AUD, as nice as that is - still will cost me over 100AUD to distribute the code at all." Update: As Matthew Garret pointed out in the comments, he wrote his side of the story on his blog.
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Member since:2005-06-29
That heavily depends, you cannot charge more for the sources than the cost of the physical distribution, what is the cost of sending a 1 of changes over the Internet these days.. close to zero, even if we go by burning to cd and shipping by post I'd wager you could do it for 2 bucks maybe.
Paul was wrong and he was hiding behind being disabled while doing so, as a disabled person myself I find that offensive.
He was asking donations and bitching that he didn't get more than 9.90AUD for his efforts. With my host I could ship maybe 10-20GB for that amount of money. He was being unreasonable in his request and violating the GPL. Hosting costs is not distribution costs and even if that was his true goal, which I doubt, there are more polite ways and easier ways to get that problem sorted.
He could also just have submitted the patch upstream thus removing the issue once and for all. He would have gotten credit.. It simply looks to me like he was looking to get paid by blackmailing users who encountered this problem by selling them an unverfied and possibly insecure or otherwise not advicable fix.
If he was looking to get paid and he had the skills (after all he should have a proven track record as a FOSS contributor right?), write mail or post to the Ubuntu/whatever forums saying "I have time and the needed skills to work on this - I will do so for XXX USD and get the fix merged upstream within 90 days, here is my list of references". Now how many people would have responded nicely to that?
Personally I've put out a 100 USD bounty on fixing the SCSI command permissions for burners within a given timelimit and the response has been great so far. Although no solution has been submitted the bug got attention on Linux-scsi and a proper fix is being worked on. I'd call that 100 bucks well spend.
Member since:2005-07-06
That heavily depends, you cannot charge more for the sources than the cost of the physical distribution, what is the cost of sending a 1 of changes over the Internet these days.. close to zero, even if we go by burning to cd and shipping by post I'd wager you could do it for 2 bucks maybe.
And the cost of setting up a link to his website is somehow more than that?
In lieu of a donation, he asked for a bartered exchange. That does not sound like "more than the cost of distribution." It is certainly even closer to zero than the cost of distributing the source code.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I still don't see anyone addressing the fact that the sources were available for free, effectively. As I pointed out above, all one had to do was plug the man's business and tell him how to find the link. Whatever that cost, it is certainly less than the cost of distributing the sources.
I think Mr. Garrett was wrong. Polite, yes, but wrong. Paul was not, AFAICT, in violation of the GPL.