@sally I believe Trisquel goes with options b and c under section 3;
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,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

(The offer is written in text and the medium is bittorrent).

Of course, nobody bothers to take that, as they just download the offered sources.

The GPLv2 is indeed a problem for torrenting software with many different versions that aren't trivial to accompany with a written offer, unlike a whole OS image that has everything required to display the offer.


To be entirely honest, even if you technically end up infringing a free license while distributing free software for purposes of freedom, as long as people can actually get the version of source code that they want, all sane copyright holders are going to give an exception for that case if required.