Dinesh Joshi wrote:
On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 19:20 +0530, Rony wrote:
If you are not the purchaser, you may not be able to get the SC. The big ISP which buys it in bulk has to request for it.
No. If the code is GPLed anyone can demand it. Customer or otherwise.
Yesterday I went through the entire GPL v3 and its FAQs. There in one of the examples I read, if a company gets software created from someone and he provides it under GPL, the employees who are users cannot demand any SC for the software they use on their systems, even if they take the software home and install it on their systems. The GPL provides the right of freedom to the company but it does not force it to pass it on to the users. Similarly though people use voting machines, the SC for the GPLed code inside is not accessible to the public.
The grey area is about treating devices on lease/rent as distribution or simply company use. Anyway, I have written a mail about the same to GNU and hope to receive a reply from them.