Hi all, I have a question. I have at various times been interested on getting Debian working on an Old World PowerPC Macintosh and have come across a situation that confuses me. I was able to get the mac working with the use of floppies that include a tool call miBoot, that are distributed on people.debian.org/~dontremember. The main debian-installer daily builds do not include the miBoot floppy images.
The thing is the reason they are not part of debian proper is that miBoot is non-free and possibly non-distributable (see below). My question is whether including them on p.p.o is therefore a violation of debian policy? It seems odd to me that p.p.o should be used as a way around debian policy. miBoot is GPL but requires CodeWarrior (a proprietary compiler) to build, and *cannot* be built with free tools (although work is underway to change this). My understanding of the debian interpretation of of the GPL is that this makes miBoot non-distributable because under the GPL everything required to build the binaries must be available as source, including the compiler (unless the compiler is part of the system the code is built on, which is not the case here) and since the compiler is not available as source code debian cannot meet its GPL obligations for miBoot-based binaries. Am I mistaken in the debian policy in this regard, and if not, what's the deal with distributing it on p.p.o? I'd like this question resolved one way or another because at the moment Old World Macs are in a kind of limbo between official support and a clear statement that they cannot be supported. Regards, Daniel -- And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early, now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore GnuPG Key Fingerprint 86 F5 81 A5 D4 2E 1F 1C http://gnupg.org No more sea shells: Daniel's Weblog http://cshore.wordpress.com
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