Re:Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
by piaste on Monday August 30, 2021 @03:36AM
(#28353488)
> but putting their modified source code on some "archived" GitHub or similar would have been easy and free.
You still need to set up mirroring to keep it up-to-date, and janitor tags so that it matches whatever the customer actually received.
Much more importantly, you run the risk of a classic 'whoops I pushed an API key' blunder if your code gets auto-mirrored to a public repo.
Writing "if you're a human and you want the source code we'll give it to you" costs them about thirty seconds, satisfies the FSF, and carries zero risks.
Re:Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
by prepend on Monday August 30, 2021 @11:38AM
(#28356733)
> Much more importantly, you run the risk of a classic 'whoops I pushed an API key' blunder if your code gets auto-mirrored to a public repo.
Thousands of competent projects and millions of incompetent projects figured it out. This is not a reason to distribute source code digitally. Any use of this reasoning just makes the user seem stupid and unable to reduce the risk on this trivial problem.
My point is that we're not in 1997 anymore (date this GNU document was written), and thus I cannot believe that mailing disks is the easy way to do this. They are making this deliberately difficult, for both them and their users, by doing this over mail.
As for discouraging companies to deal with GPL, I am with you. I think this is a little bit different though, as they are not adding much value on top of the open-source code...