Re: building Debian source packages
"Noah L. Meyerhans" <frodo@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
Unfortunately, I can't do that at this point. I use a Motif C++
application framework called ViewKit (www.viewkit.com) that depends on
some internal (undocumented) Motif functions. Lesstif really can't ever
support this, since in order to know about these functions, they would
have to have seen the Motif source code.
That's not strictly true. The existence and use of undocumented Motif
functions can be learned from Motif binaries or from source or
binaries of programs that use the functions. Using this knowledge
wouldn't prejudice the Lesstif developers' position.
As a comparison, how do you think that WINE developers implemented
undocumented Windows functions? I doubt whether they ever had access
to Windows source code, but it is definitely necessary for them to
implement undocumented Windows functions, because otherwise a large
percentage of Windows program simply wouldn't work under WINE.
Seeing the source code to a commercial program puts you in a bad
legal position when you're trying to code a free clone of the same
program....
Agreed. But you don't need to see the source code to learn about
undocumented functions; it's just harder, that's all.
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