Re: draft for new Vim license
Glenn Maynard <g_dlegal@zewt.org> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 03:03:45PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > > If linking is "changing", that would seem to make licenses that say "you can
> > > distribute unmodified binaries only" impossible--you'd only be able to
> > > distribute binaries supplied by the author.
> >
> > Quite right. I have no idea what those licenses mean, but I've
> > generally only seen them when the author in fact is supplying
> > binaries.
>
> What they *mean* seems fairly obvious to me: you can recompile the source
> (presumably for different architectures or library versions), and
> distribute those binaries, but you can't modify the source and
> distribute binaries based on that.
Except to say "you can only distribute unmodified binaries" makes no
sense if there are no binaries to begin with. Compiling source to a
binary *is* a modification, it *is* the creation of a derived work.
Your interpretation would say that when the license says "you may not
distribute modified binaries" it means "you may not distribute
binaries made from modified source", which is a quite different thing.
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