Missing full source code for Windows

[renatosilva]

Pidgin for Windows includes several binaries for which the source code is not redistributed, namely the libraries listed in BuildingWinPidgin. Specially SILC, Dr. MinGW and the Perl library are custom builds with no source available at all. There may be similar issues with the 3.x branch. The ​GTK+ website for example states:

You are welcome to redistribute GTK+ binaries, including applications that bundle them, on other web sites, CD-ROM, and other media. You don't have to ask for permission. That's one of the points of Free Software. One important thing that the GNU licenses require is that you must also redistribute the source code.

According to GPLv2, you must provide the entire source code, and this includes redistribution of third-party libraries. One may claim that Pidgin uses the written offer clause 3(b), however there seems to be no such offer anywhere. This means that Pidgin is currently violating the GPL, and has been doing so for a long time.

However, even if you go for the written offer, such promise is not fair to the open source community, specially when you intend to claim ​possible violations by others. Otherwise, I hereby request full source code for all versions of Windows Pidgin that are available for download. Therefore you can see it's just better to provide the full source code as stated in 3(a).

As for how to automate this, I suggest making generate_gtk_runtime.sh also create a source bundle, then gather all other libraries with a new script and start uploading everything to wherever you distribute Pidgin. Additionally, upload source for the custom libraries also to ​where they are distributed and allow directory listing of this folder.

[Daniel Atallah <datallah@…>]

(In [41f86d6ff6b0]):
win32: update gtk+ download to generate a source zip. Refs #16502