Guido Serra wrote:
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If you distribute a GPL-derived work to one of your clients, you are obliged to give the sources to them, and only to them. No one else is entitled to a copy of the sources, if they did not get the binaries.
Of course, your client is then free to give binaries *and* sources to whomever they please, subject to the same requirement.
Whether changing configuration files, instead of sources, constitutes a derived work is a murkier matter, with no general answers.
he he, you centered the question... that's my problem
anyway i have no problem at all, when integrating everything, if i find a bug, to correct it, contact the project maintainer, and distribute the source to my customers
the problem is just on "configuration" and "bundling" scripts, that's my "asset" ... i get payed for
ok my situation is insofar different as i'm not selfemployed...
but just think about the following: you know your buildsystem once you have it the way you want it to be, whereas everybody else who want's to use it for his own customation has to invest (maybe) a lot of time to work into it. so while you would need 1-2 hours for a small change, somebody else has to study it and find out what problems could arise from using it. so for a (very) configurably system, the other guy has to invest maybe a week or so at least to get near your knowlege you have about it. so since time _does_ have a price (which is quite considerable) to buissneses.
ok, so what if some other consultant works into your system and uses it? well, you will have a competitor, though if you make it right and it gets accepted, you will also get patches and so on back which also is valuable for you.
but there is another part: the point of free software is that you give everything _to your customer_, not necesarily to the genral public and i don't think they want to change that int gplv3, since this would lead to problems for example for the buissness model of offering customizations for in house development where there could be the problem that you could also encounter the situation where you have a customer that says "ok i want to have this work done on this gpl projekt, but you will only give it to me and not to anybody elese because you will incoperate knowlege of our interior workings...
just my opinion of course...
yours albert