On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 4:28 AM, Ian Malone <ibmal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Does patching software legally make it a fork? > > I'm not aware of any legal definition of a fork (IANAL etc.). There > are derivatives of copyrighted material, which open source licenses > allow (if they don't they're not usually regarded as open source). > Your correspondent is right, you have a fork in that the source they > are using is no longer the upstream, it may be a trivial patch (and a > trivial fork), but they're making a point about the difficulty of > maintaining this in what is effectively a distro (many packages and > sources) and that upstream is the best place for patches. Exactly > where people draw the line in patches that haven't made it into > upstream will vary between projects (you'll find many Fedora srpms > that contain patches), if it's not a critical one for many people > (e.g. heartbleed) then I wouldn't be surprised if they wait for the > patch to come in from upstream rather than patch it in the build, > especially if one person is looking after hundreds of packages. In the > meantime there is absolutely nothing stopping you from applying a > patch locally. > Well I already submitted it upstream but I have no intention of waiting for it. While I really like cmake as a product and much prefer it to autotools, I've seen bugs with trivial fixes sit for years in their bug tracker. I did patch my local install so I was never worried about waiting for the fix from a practical point of view, I'm more worried about other users that may run into the same problem. Thanks, Richard
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