Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has replied to my blog post about Debian not complying to licenses.

Dear Alexander, Debian is still not complying to licenses. And please don't cite me without the necessary context, thanks.

First, debian-cd (and also debimg) must contain the sources for syslinux, not to fulfil the GPL, but to fulfil the Debian policy. Read what I wrote here and here.

Second, even if debian-cd would go for source distribution under GPL clause 3b), both the current debian-cd version available in unstable (version 3.0.4) and current svn head (revision 1686, dated 2008-09-04) do not contain a written offer to obtain the sources for the embedded syslinux binary and are therefore, still, violating the GNU General Public License.