Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Downloads

Re:Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Dow... by fenwick67 on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @01:29PM (#16318240)

You have to offer the source code. It's in section 6, more specifically parts D or E apply since it's distributed over the network.

Option D:

> Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge (...)

or option E...

> Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered (...)

Also, in section 5e:

> The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License

This is pretty blatantly violating these terms.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

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Re:Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Dow... by lambada on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @02:43PM (#16318906)

Hmm interesting, that's a subtle change between gplv2 and v3 I was unaware of, thanks!

For completeness, GPLv3 has the following option available:

>c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.

Whilst the equivilent in v2 ( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html ) is

> b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, [next clause]

Which is a lot less restrictive over when you can use the written offer approach.

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Re:Google Won’t Take Down ‘Pirate’ VLC with Five Million Dow... by jgowdy on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @05:34PM (#16320577)

You have to offer the source code to the people you give the binaries to. For example, if your product isn’t free, you only owe source code to those who you sell your product to (assuming that’s exhaustively who you distribute it to). You don’t have to offer the source code to everyone in the world, nor to the authors of the parent work in particular.

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