On Sun, 2010-01-03 at 09:55 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Bob Ham
<rah(a)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(a)bash.sh>
for (;;) { ++pancakes; }