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Emacs Has Been Violating the GPL Since 2009
Digana writes "Emacs, one of GNU's flagship products and the most famous software creation of Richard Stallman, has been discovered to be violating the GPL since 2009-09-28 by distributing binaries that were missing source. The CEDET package, a set of contributed files for giving certain IDE functionality related to static code analysis, has distributed files generated from bison grammars without distributing the grammar itself. This happened for Emacs versions 23.2 and 23.3, released during late 2009, and has just been discovered."
Doesn't anyone test the source tarball to ensure you can recreate the binary from it?
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...just hit Ctrl + R and Alt + Shift + P + OMG and they're right there!
On a more serious note, It was probably a goof on their part. The fact that no one noticed until now is pretty strange, though.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I saw them consorting with Lucifer in the fields--with mine own eyes, I did! They was compiling binaries with unreleased source and plotting against FOSS hippies, they was!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's the most important question.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
RMS will sue himself?
I was really under the impression that the GPL said you had to distribute the source to anyone you sent the binaries if they actually bothered to request it. I mean, usually that means you publish both, just as a matter of convenience, but not of necessity.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The source code is included. Just not the source for the source code.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
RMS will sue himself?
Oh now that's just redicu... hmm
Yup, he actually might!
If not, then it's not breaking GPL.
...that has violated the GPL, it's anyone who has _redistributed_ Emacs. The original distributors (FSF, I assume) have presumably had the source available and could have given it to anyone who asked for it, which is what the GPL requires. They just forgot to put it in the tarball.
But people who have redistributed the Emacs package, like for example GNU mirrors or every desktop Linux distribution in the world, could not have made the source available upon request, since they never had it.
From the mail linked to in the story: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-07/msg01155.html
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The FSF is the copyright holder of Emacs. All code that is integrated with Emacs is covered by a copyright assignment. They can't violate the GPL when they distribute Emacs, because they are not bound by it.
It's a good thing people gave Stallman that katana after the xkcd strip came out, because there's now only one option. Reclaim your honor, sir.
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No, it is not source code in the sense the GPL requires: "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". Just because something is in compilable ascii code doesn't make it the source code. You could no doubt convert a binary into some huge hex constant which would be valid C and would compile back to the binary, but nobody would accept that as the source code.
That said, the problem is trivial. It is obviously just a minor cock-up which no-one has noticed. Formally, they should either have included the bison source, which they have just realised they didn't. or have include a formal offer to provide it on demand, which they probably didn't do because they thought they were offering full source. But I think anybody would realise that such an offer was implicit in any software released by the FSF. To worry that the FSF would /not/ releas source should they have been found to have accidentally omitted something, as appears to have happened here, is frankly perverse.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Yes. And this is what happens all the time in F/OSS license violation cases. No-one pays out zillions of dollars: they fix the infringement. Happens to hardware vendors who haven't got a clue, malicious software vendors who got caught, well-intentioned ones who made a mistake...happens all the time. I dunno why this is suddenly news.
(For example, I suspect it's somewhat unlikely that any Linux distribution's 'F/OSS only' repositories are actually F/OSS only. The distros which take license compliance most seriously - Debian and Fedora/Red Hat - actively search out licensing issues, find them all the time, and get them resolved. This is a deeply un-sexy ongoing background process which most people are shielded from by the power of not giving a crap. But yeah, since we've been finding licensing issues that affect all distros that haven't been caught in years _all the time_, it seems unreasonable to assume that the last big one we found was the last one and everything's fine now.)
tl;dr summary: licensing is hard, mmkay?
If they have failed to provide it when requested, not "refused", and they have: the thing that is purported to be the complete source code that is available on request is not the complete "source code" as defined in the GPL, so insofar as everyone who has downloaded the thing purporting to be the complete source code has, in sending the download request, requested the source code and as the FSF has failed to deliver the source code in response to those requests, they have failed to provide the source code on request.
Now, because the whole thing builds fine, and its quite likely very few people were concerned about editing the grammar files, its quite likely that people didn't notice that they didn't have the "source code" as defined in the GPL, which is not merely "some files from which the executables can be built", but "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
Here is the difference:
The GPL implies free-as-in-beer, which is a major point. If there were a story about a copyright violator who downloaded Inception.720p.xvid.GROUPNAME from thepiratebay, burned lots of copies of it to DVD, and then sold each copy on the street, I have no doubt every person on slashdot would see this as a morally reprehensible act (perhaps some would say that "turnabout is fair play" but even these people see it as an ethical wrong.)
Copyright is supposed to keep *that* from happening. Making a profit off of someone else's creativity without permission. That is what most GPL violations are.
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G