Re: Screw non-free.
On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 12:16:27PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 12:55:23PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 09:39:50PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > A package was built by the maintainer for one architecture.
> > > Can I be sure, that the licence allows rebuilding it on another
> > > architecture?
> >
> > Not without reading the license, no. Apparently there've been packages
> > like this in the past -- ie, ones that you specifically can't build on
> > some architectures. No idea if there are any currently.
>
> A similar example was the xforms widget library. In that case, it
> wasn't that the license didn't allow recompiling, it's that you
> *couldn't* recompile because the source wasn't available.
>
> As I recall, xforms got built for ia64 in time for the woody release
> because Progeny contacted the authors, and were sent a copy of the
> source code to compile it on one of their ia64 machines.
>...
XForms was binary-only, and therefore recompiling wasn't possible.
The control file explicitely listed the architectures that were
supported, and the source package shipped the binaries for these
architectures.
The main question in this discussion is whether there might be possible
legal issues for someone who'd set up a buildd for non-free, and in this
context the old XForms wouldn't have been a problem.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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