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A comment on Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All the Time. Parent comment

Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by ghaff on Friday February 19, 2016 @10:00AM (#11133774)
>If the shipped source doesn't contain enough information to actually perform a build surely that's a straight-up GPL violation

Why would it be? Build and testing systems for something like a Linux distribution are far more complex systems than a simple script. In any case, there's no requirement in the GPL (or any other OSI-approved license AFAIK) to include components outside of the software itself to simplify building and installing. Of course, there are a variety of things like package managers that do simplify the process but there's no requirement in the GPL that it be straightforward to install from sources.

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by lmm on Friday February 19, 2016 @10:03AM (#11133787)
The requirement is to ship the source in the preferred form for making modifications. That doesn't include standardized external tools, but it surely includes the build instructions (with things like which versions of the tools to use) and test suite (and indeed git history - mjg59 has disagreed with me regarding that before, but I don't think he gave a rationale) - those are things you'd definitely want to have for making modifications.
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