Just curious, e.g., dreamhost.com modifies Debian .debs to produce
their hosting environment, which we Dreamhost users then use on our
shell accounts there.

If I can do
$ cat file
then I should always also be able to cat the source (.deb) to that
same cat, no? (I can at present.)

Yes I read that Affero news, but am not sure it is relevant.

Ben Finney wrote:

This is actually a very intriguing question. If I have a shell account
on someone's computer, and I can copy a binary that resides somewhere
in /bin (or wherever), is the work being distributed to me?

toad:~> ls -l /bin/ls
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 29624 Jan 15 04:30 /bin/ls*
toad:~> cp /bin/ls myls
toad:~>

Can I now demand the source to /bin/ls from the administrators of 'toad'?

Probably it's more in the "making available" category of copyright
infringement.

Arnoud

On Jan 24, 2008 7:41 AM, Arnoud Engelfriet engelfriet.net> wrote:

That is indeed an intriguing question. Within the GPL language of
"distribution", it's probably a little unclear. However, GPL v.3 would
appear to be a little tighter on the issue:

On Thu Jan 24 11:37, John Halton wrote:

So, do we need to have the sources all installed on our shell hosts? or
a written offer good for three years to provide the source?

Maybe having a deb-src line is good enough since users can run apt-get
source?

Matt

--
Matthew Johnson

On Jan 24, 2008 11:41 AM, Matthew Johnson debian.org> wrote:

Matthew Johnson wrote:

Perhaps a simple way to avoid this is to simply 'chmod g-r' the
executables in question. With only execute permission a mortal user
cannot copy the binary, so there's no propagation going on.

Dear legal beagles, all I know is if one day I couldn't do
me@dreamhost$ dpkg -l && apt-get --print-uris ... && wget ...
to examine the .debs that were Debian debs but slightly modified by
Dreamhost (or other such web host), well that would mean the whole
Free Software concept had come to a grinding halt. I.e., Junior is
sitting at the prompt using
$ emacs ...; grep ...
but no longer able to see the source of what he is using. Yes he could
go to gnu.org or debian.org and see some progenitor versions, but not the
source of what he is using, despite all the Copyleft labels still
visible in them using strings(1).

So Dear legal beagles, please close this loophole, if any.

On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 03:33:34AM +0800, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

As outlined previously in the discussion, I don't think there *is* a
"loophole" here. Anyone using GPL v.3 software (which includes almost
all GNU software issued since GPL v.3 was introduced) to provide
remote shell access appears to be bound by GPL v.3 to provide the
source, whether they have modified that software or otherwise.

At least, that's my take, and no-one has yet put forward a
counter-argument on this thread.

So there is no loophole, but equally there is probably a very high
rate of non-compliance, which is a different matter.

John

(TINLA)

\"John Halton\" gmail.com> wrote:

I think that's a bit *too* broad. I'm pretty sure that I've been told by
lawyers at seminars that it has to pass some (low) effort threshold to
sustain copyright. The main legislation (Copyright Designs and Patents
Act 1988) seems not to cover this and I found [2005] EWCA Civ 565 saying:-