Francois Gouget wrote:
I see exactly what you mean. You mean a binary patch that says things like:
delete bytes 2294 to 2297
replace bytes 38455 to 39345 with "...."
insert "...." at offset 41753
Such a patch is very specific to a given source version but does not
include any of the original source.
Well, if you can legally use such a patch to work-around the LGPL license, then you can use it to get past *any* license: GPL, AFPL, MS shared-source, .... whatever. And this is not only true of source files, this is also true of binary files: you can apply such a patch to executables, libraries, mp3s, mpegs, ...
At Corel, we investigated this issue with respect to redistributing a patch to MFC to get it building under Wine (at the time it didn't). The MFC license did not allow redistribution of MFC source code.
The lawyer's opinion was that a patch of this sort was perfectly legitimate.
-Gav