On 14.11.2012 15:30, Michael Meskes wrote: > On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 10:56:50AM +0100, Felix Geyer wrote: >> When you want to modify the BIOS you change the code in the files of the >> first variant so only that is considered the source code of the BIOS. > > Well, you can change the assembler file directly. I wonder what happened if we > just remove the OpenWatcom source files from the tarball?
Removing the Open Watcom source files would be a GPL violation unless upstream explicitly adds a license to the generated assembler files. Anyway I fail to see how removing free source code files could change anything in terms of DFSG-freeness of the whole thing. > Or if the developers hadn't told us but instead said they created the > assembler file by hand? It's pretty hard to believe that someone could write and maintain 15,000 lines of assembler code without a single comment. >> That is a problem because it's impossible to modify the BIOS (e.g. by adding >> a distro patch) without someone running Open Watcom. > > Why's that? We can change assembler source files, can't we? Sure, you can modify those assembler files but they are just a post-processed compiler output. That means in practice you can't modify it in a meaningful way. In fact the files say "Auto Generated source file. Do not edit." ;-) For example we would be unable to cherry-pick a BIOS fix from trunk. > I really wonder if we're trying to be more catholic than the pope here. I don't think so because where does it end? With the same argument you could declare every disassembled binary that is built from high level language code as source code. Regards, Felix -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
