Not quite, they could make you request it by post and send it on a stack of floppies.

Sounds like a cheap way to get my hands on some floppies.

you are right a stack of printed qr codes is better

No, that's too easily machine-read. Print it in a fancy calligraphy font or one with ambiguous characters.

Reminds me of Lavabit where the US wanted the encryption keys and they printed them out in a 4 point font :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Legacy

That's too convenient, cameras can read many qr codes at a time. Encode the binary on some punch cards.

Pretty sure cameras can be used to read punchcards too.

This sounds like a fun project. Somebody already did it, apparently: https://hackaday.com/2012/07/30/reading-punch-cards-with-an-...

They don't have to be cheap.

GPL requires providing the source code via a medium customarily used for software interchange. Deliberately making it inconvenient by using a medium no longer customarily used for software interchange is a GPL violation. Google Drive is already an unusual way to distribute software.

Google is already failing to provide the Pixel kernel drivers in the preferred form for modification. Their kernel build system uses Git commands but yet they aren't providing the Git repositories it expects to be there. They had to provide a repo metadata file as a workaround but it's not the same since the revisions of the code aren't set properly in the resulting build.

Google is arguably already violating the GPL. They're deliberately making it inconvenient and are adding deliberate delays through requiring manual handling of the requests.

Greenbar printouts.

I'm pretty sure there is a lot of code in Android that belongs to Google and is not part of an upstream GPL project. They would be completely entitled to stop sharing it.

Isn't that the point of Google Play Services? To keep their proprietary code separate, in a super-app that doesn't obey the GPL?