definition of "distribution system" unclear

[thistle-witch]

Publish all source code for the software in the preferred form for making changes through a freely accessible distribution system widely used for similar source code so the contributor and others can find and copy it.

What is considered a distribution system? Would it be git or websites like GitHub? I'm asking because if distribution system refers to things like GitHub that would preclude publishing code on a self-hosted git server.

[kemitchell]

Sorry for delay reaching this issue. My father died earlier this year and I'm still working through the mound of e-mails and other notifications I fell behind on.

The language you quoted was written with GitHub or GitLab in mind, but anticipating that hard-coding specific companies and platforms only leads to problems, long-term. We wouldn't use a license that specifically required sharing source code through Freshmeat or SourceForge today. We don't want Parity to become that kind of license ten years from now. So we describe the role that GitHub plays today in general terms.

You mentioned that the language would exclude a self-hosted Git server. That's correct. The purpose of this requirement is to make sure that the developers of the Parity-license project and other potential users can find and download the source code, without having to ask the new contributor or requiring them to notify of their changes trough some peculiar process. That would not be achieved by just putting the code onto some Web server nobody has heard of.