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Spicebird Portable 0.7 Dev Test Ready But Waiting

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John T. Haller
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Spicebird Portable 0.7 Dev Test Ready But Waiting

Just to keep folks in the loop, I have Spicebird Portable 0.7 ready to go as a development test but Spicebird hasn't made available their source tarball yet so we can't distribute the binaries without it.

LOGAN-Portable
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I don't think that's a big

I don't think that's a big problem for a development test, right? By the time you get to the official release it might become an issue.

John T. Haller
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Legality

Even if it's a dev test, you're still required by law to redistribute the GPLed and LGPLed code. We do this for all of our officially-hosted pre-releases and development tests. Technically speaking, all our devs should be doing this for their personal dev tests that they are self-hosting as well.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

LOGAN-Portable
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Well, I thought that the

Well, I thought that the binaries were unaltered thus the official source can be obtained from the Spicebird site. (I thought technically you only needed to publish any changes and a link to the official source.) Although the source wasn't available as tarbal I guess they would make it available shortly.

I admire you following GPL to the letter, but I really thought that as PortableApps use unaltered compiled binaries, it would be enough to point people to the official source.

And I don't think you get sued, flamed or even criticized for having the source available a little later.

John T. Haller
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Source

If you distribute a GPL or LGPLed binary, even unaltered, you are required by the GPL to also distribute the corresponding source code. It even specifically says that pointing to the upstream source provider is not sufficient. The reasoning is sound as it would put extra bandwidth on an upstream provider if a downstream's binaries became hugely popular and it handles the issue of what if the upstream provider goes dark.

The source hosting and providing for 3 years requirement isn't just following the letter of the GPL, it's also part of following the spirit of it. True, some people are willfully violating the GPL by packaging GPLed apps and the copyright holders may not do anything. But, if they want to, they can rescind the right of redistribution from the violators if they choose to.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Steve Lamerton
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