[Savannah-hackers] mldonkey licensing

[Mathieu Roy]

        Hi,

Someone reported a potential legal issue about your project, mldonkey,
hosted on savannah. 

Apparently, you do not provide a source code's tarball for each
mldonkey releases but only binaries: there's no such source code's
tarball in your download area, neither exists file including pointers to
such tarball somewhere else.

Since you choose the GPL license, you _must_ do so.  See COPYING:

"[...]
 3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
    source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
    1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software
    interchange; or,

    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
    years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
    cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
    machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
    distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
    customarily used for software interchange; or,
[...]"


Also, in Readme.txt in mldonkey-1.16 binary tarball, it is said that: 

"[...]
 Most sources are available on the savannah WEB site, except the
 protocol
 files:
 
   http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/mldonkey/
 
 However, the distribution contains enough information to port
 mldonkey
 on all systems where Objective-Caml has been ported. In the future,
 we will
 provide additionnal files with a pseudo-protocol, so that
 contributors can
 test their changes on a local network before sending them to us.
 
 We will not release the protocol, because we don't want to be
 accused of
 being the murderers of the eDonkey network. However, since our
 knowledge of
 the protocol is only partial, we are interested in any information
 on it.
[...]"


Are "the protocol files" part of mldonkey? Are "the protocol files" required
in order to run mldonkey?
If so, it means that your project depends on undefined licensed
software - that we cannot qualify as free.
You never talked about this particular requirement.

In the same package, I find no licensing informations, despite the
fact that at the project registration we (savannah-hackers)
explicitely asked you to insert statements about copying conditions
and copyright notices, as it must be to avoid any legal issues.


This two problems are very serious to us: it constitutes violation of
the license you chose and, so, a serious injury to the savannah policy.

Please give us promptly your point-of-view on the subject.

Regards,

-- 
Mathieu Roy
 
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