Re: Emacs 23.4 Updated Windows Binaries published

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 04:46, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman writes:
>
>  > I have not been following this particular thread, but my
>  > understanding is that only a link to the relevant sources is needed
>  > now - if we can guarantee that this works. (This was my
>  > understanding of a message from RMS quite some time ago. I might
>  > have misunderstood it, though.)
>
> If you mean that Emacs doesn't need to distribute those sources *with
> Emacs*, that is true.  If you mean that Emacs docs can point to the
> upstream sources, you misunderstand.

Stephen, can you please explain exactly what makes it not permissible
to point to the upstream sources? You say below that it does not
satisfy the GPL. Is that what you mean? What does it break?

>  > A real problem is however to keep the libraries updated.
>
> This is the problem.  If you distribute binaries, you must make the
> corresponding sources for the exact version of each distributed binary
> available according to the GPL.  The message you refer to undoubtedly
> was explaining certain corner cases where these sources need not be
> delivered in the same packages as the binaries (there are pretty
> severe conditions on this, though).
>
> If Emacs makes *zero* changes to the 3rd party sources for its
> distribution, then theoretically it would be OK to point to them (but
> it doesn't satisfy the GPL!)  However, that case is likely to be
> fairly rare (I would guess that in most cases the build scripts would
> be modified or not yet published security patches applied, etc), and
> so practically the GPL's requirement that you distribute the
> corresponding source *yourself* is simple and reasonable.