On Sun, May 27, 2001 at 12:22:23PM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote:
>
> ----
>
> DeHQX v2.0.0 © Peter Lewis, Aug 1991.
> This program is Freeware.
freeware != free software, but lets look at the rest....
> This source code may be used for any non-commercial purpose as long
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> as I get a mention in the about box and documentation of any derivative
> program.
bang, non-free. if we distribute this, and commercial entities
distribute/sell debian CDs for profit we have just violated this
licence i think. it fails DFSG 6
also it makes no mention of allowing modification of the source, or
distribution of such modifications.
>
> DeHQX was written in THINK Pascal v3.0.2. To create a project file for this
> code, open Main.p and follow the directions there. The code is very
> sparsely commented, but should be fairly understandable with the exception
> of the code that actually performs the dehqxing. All pascal units ending
> with .unit are taken from my personal library of reusable modules, and
> should be fairly easy to incorporate into any other program.
this is documentation rather then licencing it appears. the the
mention about being easy to incorporate into other programs suggests
that modification is allowed, but that is an ambiguous leap... the
non-commercial use only clause above already makes it non-free
anyway.
[snip]
>
> If you use DeHQX or its source, please send me a note!
define `use' see also the recent debacle about ipfilter on *BSD.
> ----
>
> I located source for MacBinary III in Pascal, also by Peter Lewis, which
> doesn't have a license included. There was also source for DropMacBinary III
yes i think MacBinaryIII is public domain, but we must find some sort
of licence or statement to that.
> in C, but it uses a shell internally which prohibits distribution of changed
> versions. I think BinHex is a better target than MacBinary, because
> MacBinary simply combines the two forks into one file (it's still binary)
> while BinHex does that but also codes the file into 6-bits transmittable.
whats wrong with a binary file? all the floppy images are binaries
too, that doesn't hurt anything. in todays modern network 6-bit ascii
encoding is no longer required or necessary (in most situations, smtp
transfer is one exception). it is in fact less efficient do to the
larger file size.
> Of course, we still have a chicken-and-egg problem with this; we can't have
> it on *nix systems unless it's binhexed and Mac users can't use it unless
> it's not. mkhybrid would take care of that (btw, mkhybrid has been rolled
> into cdrecord, upstream).
*if* we find a free software debinhexor or unmacbinarizer we can store
it in binhex or macbinary format in the archive and modify the CD
image build process to handle that file so long as it doesn't cause
any other problems. then it will be usable from the macos side of the
CD. *nix has its own tools for this purpose not that it matters since
macos binaries are unusable.
note its been suggested in the past that we use self extracting .sit.
this is also not an option because:
1) the self extracter is very proprietary and non-free
2) the self extracter has a strict licence prohibiting commercial
distribution, unless you pay aladdin a truckload of money for a
licence.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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