Re: Visualboy Advance question.
J.B. Nicholson-Owens ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): The litmus test here is a significant amount of functionality, not will refuse to work at all without it, although that's a fairly good description of a console without a ROM. Would one ROM cut it, then? I am working to determine if one ROM is available under a DFSG-free license right now. I don't have much to report yet except thanks to those who have supplied information to help me track down the copyright holder. I should know more soon and I plan to report what I've learned on debian-legal. For GBA it shouldn't be too hard, at least a few years ago hobby GBA development was pretty popular since flash cards and flashers are widely available, and so is a gcc that can cross-compile. -Billy
Re: GPL compatibility question.
Andrew Suffield ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): - one is taken from RFC 3174 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3174.html, license terms at the end). Not a chance, that's nowhere near GPL-compatible. It also appears to be non-free in its own right. I don't like the wording of derivative work that comment on..., I think it narrows the scope of what kind of derivative works are allowed. It prohibits almost any derivative work. This is very close to a shared source license. The license at the bottom is the standard RFC copyright statement, and the authors state that their implementation is being published to ensure widespread adoption. It seems likely that having the source code subject to that license was a mistake. Emailing them might be appropriate. -Billy
Re: MPlayer DFSG compatibility status
Don Armstrong ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): On Tue, 07 Oct 2003, Joe Drew wrote: So far as I know, it is not illegal to infringe on somebody else's patents. AIUI patent holders can enforce (or not) their patents at will by suing, but doing so is their perogative and no law makes it wrong for someone to infringe on a patent which isn't being enforced. Well, it is actually illegal, [...] It would be really nice to have references for those of us who haven't taken an IP law course. I don't think this one is obvious. -Billy
Re: free source code which requires non-free tools to build (dscaler modules for tvtime)
David Starner ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): * That which is in main must be buildable and usable solely with packages also in main (IOW, main is a closure); Really? Does that mean that the Windows specific parts of GCC must be removed from the tarball? Or does it only apply to programs, so if coreutils provides a 1k helper program that only compiles on OpenBSD, we can't ship an unaltered source tarball? At the very least, I'm sure I can find DOS batch files and other build programs designed to run on DOS/Windows in Debian. It seems rather excessive to say that every bit of code in Debian must be compilable on Debian; as long as it's free, and the code we're using is buildable and usable soley with packages in main, why is the other (free) code an issue? You have it backwards. The intention of the statement as I understood it is that all binaries shipped must be buildable. Shipping source code that doesn't build on Debian doesn't seem obviously non-free. -Billy
