🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Kenneth P. Turvey wrote:

> There is nothing in the GPL that indicates the fare should be only for
> handling.

Did you ever read the GPL? It says:

     You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy

and:     

     for a charge no more than your
     cost of physically performing source distribution

> $150 seems more than reasonable to me.  

Do keep in mind that they charge this for any update, and that the delay
is significant (speaking of months). Also that this distribution is not
complete. There is no library or include-files, not even the bare-bones
required to properly complete the compilation of the Sharc GCC. Presumably 
these are available as separate packages - although I have not seen their
written offer to this effect - and presumably at a charge of $150 for
every component of the system that is, or should have been, licensed
according to GPL. At any rate, you do not discover this until you have
already waited months to get the initial source distribution. They even
did not document anything about the media format used for the distribution
- I had to spend significant effort just to have it read. 

The primary issue here is that AD has felt themselves entirely free to
make use of the very significant effort behind the GCC, saving themselves
a huge amount of development effort and money in the process. But when it
comes to sharing their modified work they do not seem so keen any longer -
and IMHO they seem to try to make this as difficult as they can possibly
get away with. 

IANAL, and cannot vouch for whether what they do are actually in
accordance with the GPL, or not. Although I have a strong suspicion that
they should at least have had to provide bare-bones C include files and
library to at least allow the cross-compiler to build properly. 

IMHO, had AD been serious about the spirit of the GPL, they would of
course simply have made the full source code available on their FTP site.
Along with the very related essential components such as an assembler and
a linker. Plus the debugger of course, into which they seem to have
integrated the GNU debugger. 

Egil
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