On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 02:24:21AM +0000, Dalibor Topic wrote: > Can you interpret shell scripts without GNU Bash? Can you interpret > makefiles without GNU Make? Can you compile C programs without gcc? gcc has a special exception precisely because the generated binaries actually *are* derivatives of gcc, most of the time. There are a variety of reasons for this (it's not just crt). It would be a stretch to say that shell scripts are derivatives of bash. There are very few shell scripts which won't run on a variety of bourne shells; bash has very few features which are not duplicated elsewhere. On the other hand, something like bash_completion could quite easily be a derivative of bash. If it was under a GPL-incompatible license then we probably couldn't distribute it. Makefiles certainly can be derivatives of GNU make; all you have to do is write a makefile which relies on a bunch of the rules in the default database. It is unclear whether the FSF intended this or not. Realistically I doubt that we're likely to see problems with these two. People who are sufficiently obnoxious to use GPL-incompatible licenses usually don't write things that rely on GNU userland to function. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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