🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <RSW.92May12024413@flanger.cs.brown.EDU> rsw@cs.brown.EDU (Bob Weiner) writes:
>The GPL terms are not terribly onerous, as licenses go.  If you can't
>live with the distributor terms, don't become one.

Hmm, that brings up an interesting issue: what does it mean to "become" a
distributor.

Suppose we only have enough disk space for Emacs binaries (we temporarily
moved some stuff offline to do the build), and that disk space is in
/public, which is accessible by anonymous FTP.  So we put them there,
mainly for our own use.  Or maybe we're not concerned with security, so we
make our entire file system accessible to anonymous FTP (but we still only
have room for binaries).

Of course, we have no problem with people FTPing Emacs from our system.
Have we officially become a distributor, with all the obligations implied
by the GPL?  We haven't posted any advertisements of our site as a GNU
Emacs distributor, although archie will probably notice it and we'll be
listed there.  Traditional licensing laws, and the terminology of the GPL,
seem to assume that the distributor participates actively in the
distribution process, but in the network world the he is often passive,
just leaving the data where others can get it if they happen to trip over
it.

-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar