Bruce Perens: > I'd be happy to see someone make a "compress" package and > distribute it _from_their_own_site_ . If you can do that, please > go ahead. We'll put a note in the main archive that you distribute > it so that people can find it.
I guess that simply uploading it to sunsite or tsx-11 would work just fine. Nobody but Debian has problems with distributing compress... Red Hat, Slackware, FreeBSD, ... all have compress as part of the standard distribution. I don't think they all would do something that is against the law. Maybe something is wrong with the Debian's interpretation of the patent? Instead of debating, maybe we can just ask Unisys about this? I know gzip is better but, unlike compress, gzip is still not shipped with every UN*X system. compress is also used for X fonts. Does anyone know how to contact someone from Unisys who can give authoritative answer that Debian may (or may not) distribute compress? Too bad dpkg can't (yet) install RPMs. It would be nice to be able to buy a 5 CD set with both Debian and Red Hat, install Debian, then install the missing non-free-in-Debian-free-everywhere-else packages from the Red Hat CD. It shouldn't be impossible - most differences I've seen so far between these distributions are in startup scripts. And commercial software will ship as RPMs soon... Marek
