On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 12:03:21PM +0930, Tom Cook wrote: (lots o' snippage)
| You are not free to do what you will with it, so it is
| not free software.
Capitlize the Free :-).
| Generally speaking, a restriction on the modification of source
| kills something in Debian,
Agreed.
| since (I understand) the source has to be modified in some way
| before a .deb can be made.
Technically it isn't strictly necessary, but most software's upstream
release doesn't quite fit Policy so the DD ends up patching it.
If the upstream is the DD or if the DD has close connections, then the
upstream release may even include the debian/* build directory and not
require any patches. In the next best case, building for debian is
just a matter of adding the Makefile and tweaking compile-time options
and file locations. In hairier cases it means modifying the actual
code itself. Certainly licenses like Sun's Java SDK or DJB's
qmail and djbdns license severely hampers, if not outright kills,
debian support of it.
-D
--
[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different
sublanguages in one monolithic executable.
It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.
-- Jamie Zawinski
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/
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