Re: oaklisp: contains 500kB binary in source

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Marco Franzen <Marco.Franzen@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> Barak Pearlmutter wrote:
> > This is a technical issue related to ease of bootstrapping on a new
> > architecture, and not a legal issue.
> > 
> > As a technical measure, the circular dependency could be broken and
> > the alternative prebuild-world-in-source kludge eliminated by writing
> > an Oaklisp interpreter in another language (say, RnRS Scheme, or
> > Haskell) for invocation when an already-built Oaklisp is not available
> > on the build platform.  I'm absolutely positive the upstream
> > maintainer would welcome any such patch.  But, this has nothing to do
> > with the legal status of the package.
> 
> It may not be a legal issue, but I think it is more than merely 
> technical. It does touch the freeness question.

We can reproduce the executable, and we can make modifications to
create a new executable.  Free software does not mean that the
compilers used to create executables are free from bugs, malicious or
not.  Ken Thompson's article is just about a particularly devious way
of hiding a bug.  It doesn't make the bug immune from detection, just
a heck of a lot more difficult.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu