🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a question about the Gnu Program License that I haven't seen
exactly discussed on this list.  I'd like to hear an authoritative Gnu
answer to it.

My company sells a well-known network product (no plugs here ;-]).  When
something drastic happens out in the field, this box is able to send an
image of its memory to a host machine, and the customer can then send us
this dump for analysis.

Currently, we have some home-grown tools that allow us to disassemble
and view portions of the memory map.  With enough time and effort, it
suffices in almost every case.

However, it is difficult and time-consuming to track down problems in
multi-megabyte dump files.  I would like to integrate our tools and some
feature-specific modifications into Gnu's gdb to produce a better
bug-exterminating tool, but I've run into an apparent legal problem.

We absolutely cannot distribute the sources to our modifications -- or
even the resulting object code -- to any requestors from the general
public because it would represent a security and an internal copyright
problem.  On the other hand, we may need to be able to distribute the
objects to subsidiaries or even OEMs, if necessary.

(We could live with being forced to send source to subsidiaries, but not
to the general public.)

The GPL appears to say that this isn't one of the options (by paragraph
3) -- even if we intend not to charge anyone for the use of the program.
My reading seems to indicate that we MUST make our own internal source
code available to the world along with our modified gdb.

Is this correct?  We certainly want to abide by the restrictions, but it
isn't clear to us what we may and may not do when we're creating
programs that are not by themselves intended for sale or use by the
general public.

Thanks for any help you folks can offer, and I sure hope I don't have to
create my own debugger from scratch .... 8-(

.//.