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. -- Barak A. Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland http://www-bcl.cs.may.ie/~barak/
