NewsForge (Also owned by VA) is reporting on a recent discovery by Warren Woodford about how the
GPL could affect derivative Linux distributions. This could make life difficult for those small distros that are being maintained by one or two people in their spare time due to the high amount of work it creates. From the article:
"Woodford does supply the source code for MEPIS' reconfigured kernel in a Debian source-package. His mistake seems to have been the assumption that, so long as the source code was available somewhere, he did not have to provide it himself if he hadn't modified it. While he has not contacted any other distributions, he suspects that he is far from the only one to make this assumption. 'We, like 10,000 other people, probably, believed we were covered by the safe harbor of having an upstream distribution available online,' Woodford says. 'I think, of the 500 distributions tracked by DistroWatch, probably 450 of them are in trouble right now per this position.'"