Embed Notice
HTML Code
Corresponding Notice
- Embed this notice@lanodan @NEETzsche @mint
> I feel like this would create quite a lot of pain,
I have been running CRUX all these years and so all of the source code for everything on my machine is in /usr/src (I don't know why PKGMK_SRC_DIR doesn't default to /usr/src but I always set it to that) so the source is always there but "The source is actually just there" is another thing entirely. Until I started using Inferno, I underestimated how nice that was, and it's great on Plan 9 also. I type 'src' and then the name of a program or a library call and it is open in my editor immediately. I don't even have to look around for it or extract a tarball.
Whatever pain it causes to say "This has to come with source, no asking to mail a CD, no separate download, no having to dig through old releases to guess at which one corresponds to a binary, no goddamn cloudflare'd blog post as the only link to the source which is also cloudflared: you can't package this without including the actual source tree you used", I have not seen. If there is pain, I'm mildly interested in hearing about it but I am convinced it is either not real or it is worth it to prevent pain for the person actually using the program.
> And I think I'd rather have a license which requires to distribute a Source Code-only tarball, nothing pre-compiled/assembled/… in there.
Well, like, consider some :ocelot: fedi software :revolvertan: that you cannot actually use without compiling it. The practical difference between GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is that people that use a website are supposed to be able to get the code. People accessing this service don't point their browser at the source code.
And say this hypothetical software has got a built-in peer-to-peer content distribution system in it. This makes it easy to distribute a tarball because you just have to create a hash before building and embed that hash at build-time. And, you know, code is code, you can't really prevent people from tweaking the build to lie about what was actually compiled, but you can put it in the license and this is enough to scare cautious entities like businesses into either compliance with the terms of the license or avoiding touching it. (I don't know of a company that accepts WTFPL, let alone the gamer word variant of the AGPL.) I don't think any pain would be involved in saying "Do not remove the link to the source from either the HTTP headers or the contents of generated HTML, do not fuck up the build script to prevent the source from being added to the binary" somewhere in the license.