For Approval: CeCILL (providing source)

[Sanjoy Mahajan]

Andy Wilson:
>> An obligation to provide source in perpetuity is commercially
>> unacceptable, and of dubious value to the community.

Stephane Dalmas:
> It may have been [in 1991] a problem to provide both sources and
> binaries for very practical reasons but now this is no more the case
> (CD, DVD, Web sites with a lot of space, with secured access...).

Andy Wilson's point still holds.  Copyright lasts roughly a century
(50 or 75 years plus life of author), and in practice forever because
bought parliaments will extend it by 21 years every 20 years.  Web
sites, and domains, come and go on a timescale of a few years.  CD/DVD
formats change on a similar timescale.  About the only archive that I
even somewhat expect to exist in 100 years is <www.arXiv.org>, the
physics e-print server.  Even there I doubt the URL's will stay the
same.  So it is difficult to provide source for the entire term of
copyright.

It also is unreasonable to expect it.  If you are no longer
distributing a work, why should you have to provide source?  The Open
Software License (para 3) is well drafted on this point:

  Licensor reserves the right to satisfy this obligation [to provide
  source] by placing a machine-readable copy of the Source Code in an
  information repository reasonably calculated to permit inexpensive and
  convenient access by You for as long as Licensor continues to
  distribute the Original Work, ...

-Sanjoy