On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Gavriels State wrote:
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.
Yes, MFC is very annoying as it does not compile as is.
The lawyer's opinion was that a patch of this sort was perfectly legitimate.
Interesting. Do you know if the 'intent' of the patch entered into consideration in the opinion of the lawyer? I.e. I believe that sometimes the law gives you greater latitude if your purpose is to ensure 'interoperability' or 'compatibility'. Still, I think I am not going to publish such a patch until I can get some lawyer advice of my own :-)
-- Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr http://fgouget.free.fr/ Any sufficiently advanced Operating System is indistinguishable from Linux