On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 03:03:45PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > If linking is "changing", that would seem to make licenses that say "you can > > distribute unmodified binaries only" impossible--you'd only be able to > > distribute binaries supplied by the author. > > Quite right. I have no idea what those licenses mean, but I've > generally only seen them when the author in fact is supplying > binaries.
What they *mean* seems fairly obvious to me: you can recompile the source (presumably for different architectures or library versions), and distribute those binaries, but you can't modify the source and distribute binaries based on that. (I personally detest this type of thing, and all licenses that release source but don't let you use it properly. It strikes me as people trying to get the benefits of open source for themselves--people submitting patches, finding bugs in the source for you--without giving back anything at all to the OSS community.) -- Glenn Maynard
