No, the essence of the GPL is about <i>providing the source code</i>. It&#x27;s &quot;you can&#x27;t provide binaries without also providing source code&quot;, not &quot;you can&#x27;t do binaries&quot;.<p>&gt; <i>But we can&#x27;t just pick which bits of a license...</i><p>Talk to people who work in legal aid agencies, and they&#x27;ll tell you about triaging their limited resources; that they sometimes have to leave heartbreaking cases alone because other cases are more important. My point isn&#x27;t about the technicalities of the case, it&#x27;s about a group that is desperate for funds to merely &#x27;keep the lights on&#x27; not triaging their limited resources appropriately.<p>On a tangent, I also wholeheartedly disagree with their contention that &quot;almost there&quot; is more painful than &quot;absent&quot;. That is a piece of political bullshit (and I&#x27;ve recently ranted on progressives pissing on each other here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11133321" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11133321</a>) and it smells to me more like they&#x27;ve got an axe to grind with Canonical and are looking for ammunition. It smells doubly that way because they give Debian a pass principally because they merely label the software &#x27;contrib&#x27;, and only secondarily because no binary is in contrib, only source.<p>Short form: The SFC wants to chase down GPL violators and has suboptimal funds. Would you prefer them to spend their resources chasing down the violations where the offender provides <i>no</i> source code, or the violations that can be sidestepped by typing &#x27;make&#x27; into a terminal? Do you <i>honestly</i> believe that Oracle would be moved a single jot by Canonical putting up a wiki page that says &quot;type make!&quot; rather than provide the binary directly?