🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9205171939.AA11436@pop-tarts> tower@prep.ai.mit.edu writes:
>   This is really awful.  It means that a site which kept a continuously
>   up-to-date binary distribution available would have to be able to
>   provide a source copy of every version it ever posted.  A three year
>   window could reuqire you to make 50 versions of emacs available and
>   correspondingly awful numbers of versions of gcc or whatever.
>This is true for binary-ONLY sites.  If you have the source code with
>the binaries you are ok with the GPL.

Say what?

This seems to mean the following:

A site which has distributed binaries and sources of Gnu True 1.0, 1.1,
1.2, ...  9.0 in the past three years would only need to keep the source for
version 9.0 around.  If someone got 1.1 last year and didn't pick up the source
at the time they got it, they're stuck; they either have to get the 9.0 source
from the site, or search elsewhere.

A site which distributes only binaries _would_ have to keep pointers to all the
source versions.  It isn't legal for the site to tell someone who got 1.1
last year "well, this is where you can get 9.0".

But what's the difference between the two cases?  In the first case, the user
can either pick up the source to 1.1 when he gets the binary, pick up the
source to 9.0 now, or go somewhere else.  In the second case, his options are
identical.  So why is one prohibited and the other allowed?
--
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Ken Arromdee (UUCP: ....!jhunix!arromdee; BITNET: arromdee@jhuvm;
     INTERNET: arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu)