Marco Franzen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
