For Approval: CeCILL (providing source)

[Stéphane Dalmas]

> 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.

I think you are misunderstanding my point here. The obligation is not for the
user to still be able to get the source code in 70 years. If at one point you
offer to your customer the possibility to get a CD with the source code
or a way to access it on a Web site, you have fulfilled your obligation. Or
more accurately, one cannot consider that you have a binary only
distribution anymore. And doing that should be easy in practice for any
company large or small.

> It also is unreasonable to expect it.  If you are no longer
> distributing a work, why should you have to provide source?  

Because you originally chose to make a binary only distribution. That's the
price to pay for not playing the "open source" game fairly (which is exactly
about providing the source code !).

> 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, ...

If you do this then you fulfill the obligations of CeCILL. The only practical
problem that I can see with the way it is worded in CeCILL is with someone
that does not really want to package or provide the source code at all.

         Stéphane.