> The have an obligation to honor that written offer, which may later result in a release, but the obligation to make a written offer is not the same as an obligation to release.
The distinction appears to be academic at best, and therefore your objection to the grand-grand-whatever-parent seems pointless - thus the confusion here.
edit : just saw your clarification as to why you made the comment in the first place. Fair enough.
FWIW: It turns out not to be academic in practice.
About 25-30% of the complaints about GPL violations i've seen (for example, on gpl-violations mailing lists, though at least there, there are more valid ones recently) are actually cases where the company has made a written offer, and the person's complaint is this is a GPL violation and they should have released the source instead.
Of course, this has changed over the years for the worse (in the sense that the percentage of actual compliance seems to be dropping), but it's still not uncommon.
If you make me a written offer to provide source code and then I follow up and write to you asking for the source code, and then following that you ship me a CD with source code on it, for all intents and purposes you have released the source code to me. I'm pretty sure that the definition of "release" is the problem in this thread.
The distinction appears to be academic at best, and therefore your objection to the grand-grand-whatever-parent seems pointless - thus the confusion here.
edit : just saw your clarification as to why you made the comment in the first place. Fair enough.