Nausea Medialis

Someone recently pointed me to a Linux.com article on derivative Linux distribution. Whereas lots of people - including me - used to think it was okay to run a distro without providing sources as long as they were provided upstream, by the 'mother distro', this article makes things clear: it is not. Mepis got targeted for this and had to provide the full sources themselves. Of course, if that is what the GPL says, that's how it has to be done - you cannot claim your distro is GPL if you don't honour that same license. Strangely, it seems, no other distros (and there are plenty of derivative distributions) got targeted at the time.

Zenwalk users might know a certain guy called Béranger, who has 'annoyed' the Zenwalk team with his (rightful) questions about source availability. It seems he did not loose his edgy approach though - read this article about Zenwalk not complying with the GPL. While he certainly has a point, when it comes to his communication skills there really is a lot of room for improvement.

I have pointed out myself on the Zenwalk forums this issue needs to be addressed urgently, Zenwalk already tried to do so like a year ago, but that project horribly failed in the end, despite the good intentions. I hope Zenwalk fares better this time. While the audience of Zenwalk, a binary distro, may not be needing it, the project itself certainly does. How can we expect the GPL to be upheld by commercial corporations like Asus and Linksys if we do not respect it ourselves?