Verzion's obligation in that situation is to simply provide the source upon request. They failed to do so, hence the justification for the legal action.

The article you reference is talking about a modification to the Linux kernel and that's a clear issue. However it doesn't have any relevance to this discussion. We don't modify the Linux kernel, or any other code that's released under the GPL we simply build a package that's made up of Ubuntu Linux, an application and some JumpBox developed components. All that are very clearly independent works merely aggregated into a distribution which is unquestionably allowed by the GPL. There is nothing in the GPL that requires you to provide passwords for anything. And there is nothing in the GPL that prevents you from selling aggregations of GPLd code like every commercial linux vendor on the planet does.

There really is no question here. To make it clear think about a Tivo. A Tivo is based on Linux and also includes a bunch of proprietary software. Tivo does modify the Linux kernel so they release their changes as required. However, their proprietary software that's distributed as an aggregation with the Linux kernel is not made available, nor do they provide you any kind of password to access the internals of the Tivo. Further examples can be drawn from numerous other makers of hardware appliances. Things are complicated a little with the GPLv3, but under the terms of the GPLv2 which is what applies here, this is all very clear.

The other clause you reference here is simply fulfilled by the obligation to provide source upon request which we'll happily do.

The interesting thing about your argument though is that it's only a question because we chose to distribute JumpBoxes for free. If we simply charged for them up front the question wouldn't even exist. Given how many thousands of users we've enabled to use these great Open Source apps, I'm not sure that would be much of a win.