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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."
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.
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.
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.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
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?
People seem to love hating on this guy, but let's look at how he handled the situation:
"We have made a very bad mistake."
No PR bullshit, or excuses, just acknowledgment followed by a suggested solution. In this day it's not often you see that above-quoted sentence. Especially from know-it-alls on the internet who just shoot spitballs at people who get things done.
they're not really intended nor suitable to be read or edited by a human
You mean, like Perl ?