Ubuntu Open to Aiding Derivative Distributions

lisah writes "Bruce Byfield wrote recently of a GPL requirement that may have unintended consequences for derivative distributions. Ubuntu's technical leader Matt Zimmerman responded with the suggestion that the folks at Ubuntu might be able to assist. From the article: 'It's less clear to me whether a legal agreement with the upstream distributor could satisfy this requirement," Zimmerman says, talking about the obligation to provide source code for everything that a distro ships, "but given that Ubuntu is already obligated to continue to distribute source code for as long as we distribute binaries, it's possible that we could offer that kind of assistance if it would help.'" Newsforge is also owned by OSTG.

Comments

To the people who don't understand

[Umuri]

A lot of comments right now are to the effect of, "Why is it so hard to distribute the source?". Well, let me ask you this, do you run or rent a web site at this time? Do you have any clue how massive the original sources for some of these derivative projects are? Imagine, for instance, you're a small freelancer who writes say, 4 mb of changes to a project, but then you find you have to provide the source for the 500 mb+ original. Most people cannot afford that kind of bandwidth. And before everyone jumps on me that you can just mail out a cd/dvd with the source on it after charging handling, yes that's legit, but thats not what the original people were asking, i'm just trying to clear up some of the confusion.

Re:Tree of distributions

[Eberlin]

Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat, Slackware...all of which package nmap, which was featured in Matrix: Reloaded with Keanu Reeves.

(this part courtesy of oracleofbacon.org)
Keanu Reeves was in Speed (1994/I) with Beau Starr
Beau Starr was in Where the Truth Lies (2005) with Kevin Bacon.

So there you have it. All those original distros have at most a Bacon number of 3.

Re:Tree of distributions

[whitehatlurker]

Is this what you're looking for? Or this?