[LAD] Congratulations Ardour Team!!!

Bob Ham rah at bash.sh
Sun Jan 3 20:27:03 UTC 2010


On Sun, 2010-01-03 at 09:55 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Bob Ham <rah at bash.sh> wrote:
> > It's good to see that the source code is publicly available but I'm
> > still concerned that Harrison customers might not be told that they have
> > access to it.  I could find no mention whatsoever of source code on
> > their website.  According to the GPL 2, they must necessarily provide
> > along with their binaries, either the source code itself or a written
> > offer to provide the source code.  Is this happening?
> >
> > Again, the concern here is that there may be Harrison customers who are
> > not being made aware that they have access to the source code for the
> > software they're buying.
> 
> The software does not differ from Ardour in any way that is related to
> "GPL compliance". It prints the same messages,

That, at least is good to know.

> and is covered by same
> license. Nobody who downloads Ardour from http://ardour.org/download
> will see any extra indication of their rights under the GPL over those
> seen by a Mixbus customer, and neither will anyone who obtains Ardour
> from their Linux distribution. If you're going to get upset by Mixbus,
> then lets please start first with what happens when someone downloads
> Ardour from a Ubuntu repository.

Well, to compare Mixbus and Ubuntu, I would look at these pages:

1. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/developerzone

   which explains to users that they are welcome to participate in
   development and provides pointers to specific information;

2. https://launchpad.net/ardour

   which contains links to the Ardour home page and Ubuntu source code
   packages; and

3. http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/a/ardour/

   which offers both binaries and source code (this is equivalent to
   distributing the source code along with the binaries in the GPL 2.)


I would say that Canonical are doing their best to *encourage* customers
to contribute to Ardour and complying with the GPL.  On the other hand,
the complete absence of information on contributing to Ardour or
accessing the source code for the Free parts of Mixbus seems quite like
a GPL violation.

Bear in mind that the GPL 2 was written in the days when software
distribution was often by means such as sending magnetic tapes in the
mail.  The inclusion of a slip of paper saying that source code was also
available was a significant thing.  Note that this slip of paper would
have to have been included regardless of any messages that the software
itself displayed.

Now bring things forward to the days of 'Web 2.0' and paid-for downloads
and you can see that Canonical seem to be making an effort to comply
with the GPL.  Harrison, on the other hand seem to be making no such
effort.

As for people downloading from ardour.org, that site *hosts* the source
code!

-- 
Bob Ham <rah at bash.sh>

for (;;) { ++pancakes; }
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