[aur-general] PKGBUILD that downloads ilegal content

[Philipp Wolfer]

2015-07-05 19:39 GMT+02:00 Hugo Osvaldo Barrera <hugo at barrera.io>:

> There's a PKGBUILD[1] on the AUR that downloads a binary that is illegal
> to distribute (due to licensing, it may only be distributed in source
> form).
>
> IMHO, it's a bit of a grey area if the PKGBUILD is legal or not (I
> believe it is not in some jurisdictions), but anyone running it is
> receiving illegal content, so I don't think we should keep it around.
>

Can somebody explain to me, why this binary should be illegal at all? I
looked at the site and the code provided, and from what I can see the
entire product is covered by the GPLv3. And the license does *not* forbid
distributing binaries, it just makes it a requirement to also provide
access to the source code. Now we can discuss whether the PKGBUILD in its
current form satisfies that requirement (it provides a link to upstream,
but not directly to a source download location).

Also this implies that upstream is doing something illegal by providing
binaries of their own software, which is nonsense. They are free to do
whatever they want with their own software.

Philipp