On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:
ian>John Lapeyre writes ("Re: Bug#27906: PROPOSED] Binary-only NMU's"):
ian>> I just want to register my vote for allowing this.
ian>
ian>We are not voting.
This was an example of colloquial discourse.
ian>> It is an unstable distribution-- this is meant to be a temporary
ian>> situation; putting the patch on the BTS I think easily qualifies as making
ian>> the source available.
ian>
ian>I disagree. The wording of the GPL disagrees with you. The Debian
ian>Social Contract is unclear.
OK, the GPL requires that the source be made available at the
'same place'.
Suppose, however, that I write a program and compile it under
solaris and my cc is a link to gcc, and 'cc' is hardcoded in the makefile.
Then I put a binary and a source distribution on a site. Someone gets the
source, tries to compile it under solaris and it fails, because it needs
gcc, and 'cc' is the sun compiler on his machine. Am I violating the GPL
? (or imagine some library is hardcoded to be in /usr/opt, and the other
guy keeps it in /usr/local)
If an Alpha porter changes a rules file to exchange 'egcc' for
'cc', builds a binary, but does not upload a new source, is the GPL being
violated ? This is in fact what the bulk of the changes to my packages
consist of.
I can imagine cases in which significant changes to the source are
made. In this case, one could argue that a source file should be made
available, in order to avoid establishing a precedent that could later be
exploited by some unscrupulous person.
btw, the above argument may sound silly, but some pieces of
software are more difficult to compile than others. How much expertise
must one assume the recipient has in order to distribute under the GPL ?
The law probably makes allowance for intent to deal with gray areas.
An example at the other extreme is Karma, by Richard Gooch. He
distributes linux-binaries and source under the GPL. I tried pretty hard
to compile the thing, but failed. On the other hand I have succesfully
compiled dozens of other GPL'd packages. I Gooch violating the GPL ?
John Lapeyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Tucson,AZ http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~lapeyre
