Possible license violation

[Joe Smith]

"Robert J. Hansen" <rjh at sixdemonbag.org> wrote in message 
news:457E331B.30406 at sixdemonbag.org...
> Joe Smith wrote:
>> Theya re offering both from the same loaction (The sourceforge download
>> network) so they are complying with the GPL.
>
> I'm not certain this argument holds water.  Let's say they had a
> publicly accessible link to sf.net, but one which had no links going to
> it, so it was impossible to navigate to; the only way to get the source
> would be to have prior knowledge of this secret link.  Would that be
> considered GPL-compliant?
>
> To my understanding, the GPL requires that you inform people source is
> available.  I do not see any such notice on the PortableApps site.
>
> In the grand scheme of things this is a very minor violation, of course.
> But still, it's the principle of the thing.

I know.
On the other hand, it is common for sites to not link to source code on 
every page they link to
the binary. That does not seem unreasonable in some cases. Like if they have 
a page on the sites that links to the sources of
all packages requiring distribution of source code that can be found on 
their site. Is it a problem if that source link listing page is
not linked to directly from ppage offering the download link, but is linked 
to on for example, the front page of the site, whcih in turn is linked to by
the page with the binary download link? That seems reasonable enough to me.

In this case, it is important to note that PortableApps are distributing the 
files from the same location, and that they do have link to a  page
on which there is a link to a page that includes download links to all the 
relevent source pakages. That is very similar to the hypothetical
case listed above, except that the instead of a link to the page containing 
source links being on the site's main page, it on on the sourceforge Project 
page.
Also not that the sourceforge project page links back to the portable app 
site as the project's web page.

Also notice that while the thunderbird source is mentioned on the 
PortableApps page, it is not linked to on that page. Clearly they feel that 
users who are interested in the source code will generally know to check the 
sourceforge page for it.