[Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lindsay Haisley writes:

 > > but if they're going to make modifications to it, they need to share
 > > those modifications back with us
 > 
 > Doesn't their failure to do so violate the GPL?

No.  The GPL requires that you grant certain rights to use of your
code to downstream recipients, not that you publish code or give it
back to upstream developers.

It's failure to provide source code to paying customers (even if the
price was zero) that violates the GPL.  If one of us is willing to buy
a server system and demand source code, they either cough up or they
suffer a rerun of the Objective-C embarrassment, and then they either
cough up anyway or they lose the right to distribute Mailman.

Alternatively, if somebody knows somebody with a server system who's
willing to piss off Apple, the first somebody could get the second
somebody to do it.

This has been done in other contexts (the cPanel Mailman patch was
outed at least once by a customer, and maybe Plesk's, too), but the
history with Apple seems to go like this:

1.  Bug bites Mac server system's Mailman.
2.  Victim wastes time talking to Apple.  By the time they realize it
    is a waste of time, they're panicking.
3.  Willing to do anything, they come here and are advised to install
    Mailman from source as described in our INSTALL file.  (This
    advice was especially effective when coming from Chuq. :-)
4.  Victim discovers there's nothing they want from the Apple version,
    and by the time they've put out all the other little fires that
    sprang up while they were fighting the Mailman fire, they cool off
    enough to realize there's nothing to benefit *anybody* in the
    Apple version, and it would be best if it just went away, so they
    don't bother asking for code. ;-)

Steve