Bug#334452: debian-cd: Debian-cd website offers binaries but not sources, violating GPL
On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 05:00:39PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> I've been surprised at the degree to which Debian users seem oblivious
> to the existence or nonexistence source code. They blithely install
> binary packages with the same abandon as Microsoft users. The reason
> I want to get Source CDs now is because I frequently find that source
> packages that match my installed binaries have been withdrawn from the
> mirrors or are otherwise not available when I want/need them. It's
> particularly ironic that Debian, the most conscientious creators of
> truly-free-like-free-speech Linux distributions are so lax when it
> comes to actually following the GPL and making the source code
> available to recipients of binary releases. Thanks for making these
> simple fixes to your web pages.
I don't see how the CD/DVD images help you with getting source code that
isn't available on the the mirrors. For the stable release, the source
code doesn't disappear from the mirrors and for the unstable and testing
suites the images are generated weekly with the source code available on
the mirrors so it would probably be easier to just rsync the source
packages from a mirror if you really want to archive it...
You might also be interested in snapshot.debian.net. They already do
such archiving.
But you are right that we should add links to the source images there.
I've done that for most of the cases.
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
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