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Can someone explain what this means? Am not familiar with the terminology
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's paying a bill in pennies.
It's not even that. Downstream projects host their own mirrors already, this is an annoying hoop to jump through for the maintainers (basically suck down a bunch of tarballs for every release, analogous to grabbing stuff from FTP sites back in the day), but not exactly a terrible hardship compared to the really very significant work of maintaining a large project.
It is definitely a dick move by Google.
I think leadership in Google is getting worst day by day. The main reason to use Android is mostly sideloading and open source and they are trying to sabotage both.
Quoting the first tweet: > Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It's completely ridiculous and they've gradually become very slow at handling requests. They're in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.
> They're in clear violation of the GPLv2 now. I don't think they are? They could just as easily require requests for the source code to be made through the regular mail instead of a Google form. It's still (maliciously) compliant with the license.
If filling out the source code request form via Google Forms and/or accessing the download link via Google Drive requires the requester to run non-free (or at least non-GPLv2) JavaScript, then maybe it is in violation of section 6 of the GPLv2 ("You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein") since the requester is then required to accept an entirely different set of licensing terms and conditions.
“In violation of GPL” is a stretch. Can’t imagine Google is making the process of obtaining source code easier on themselves though. Android has always been more source-open than “open source”. The vast majority of community contributions that make it into the codebase are security fixes and small bug fixes. Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.
(However, that's quite orthogonal to being a dick about making the source code that you must share available)
Even before that it had been jokes of repositories, but at least you didn't have to ask for someone every time and wait for them to respond to the request.
(that's my understanding)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're in clear violation of the GPLv2 now. I don't think they are? They could just as easily require requests for the source code to be made through the regular mail instead of a Google form. It's still (maliciously) compliant with the license.
> I don't think they are? If filling out the source code request form via Google Forms and/or accessing the download link via Google Drive requires the requester to run non-free (or at least non-GPLv2) JavaScript, then maybe it is in violation of section 6 of the GPLv2 ("You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein") since the requester is then required to accep…
I believe section 3.b and 3.c are the rights this is referring to, where you can request the source, and even be changed for the physical act. Suggesting this extends to the license of the implementation of their contact system doesn't make sense. No method of contact, except physical, is going to meet your requirements, including sending postage, where the software used to sort your mail is not GPL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even that. Downstream projects host their own mirrors already, this is an annoying hoop to jump through for the maintainers (basically suck down a bunch of tarballs for every release, analogous to grabbing stuff from FTP sites back in the day), but not exactly a terrible hardship compared to the really very significant work of maintaining a large project.
There might be some merit to a claim that Google Drive isn't a medium customarily used for software distribution these days, but, yeah, it's definitely not paying a thousand+ cent bill in pennies, and I'm skeptical that it's a violation of the letter of the GPL. It is definitely a dick move by Google.
I suppose forcing a means to share the source code could have been too restrictive, but the GPL only speaks about the shape of the source code itself (it should be "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it"), not how it is shared, so indeed, not a violation of the letter of the GPL I think.
It's like what we had in France and the Hadopi, which requested ISPs to share the IP addresses of people torrenting a defined set of files. One of them sent them printed on paper... (But the malicious compliance was cool in this case).