Don Armstrong wrote: > Obviously we should try to figure out if the author was lying or > making fun of -legal first, but if it was actually true and debhelper > was GPLed, then we can't do anything else.
Why? debhelper is also developed in vim[1], I don't have to ship vim with
it, why would I need to ship its preprocessor with it? They are both simply
tools that let me develop the software. The fact that I didn't type in
every character of debhelper exactly as it appears in the code I
distribute to you is irelivant. There is no bright line between a
program like vim inserting useful syntatic whitespace as I type[2], and a
preprocessor expanding keywords into blocks of code. Heck, _vim_ can be
used to expand keywords into blocks of code.
The important thing is the code I distribute.
> That in both of these cases it's trivial to actually modify the work
> merely obscures the real problem: the users of the software are second
> class citizens to the copyright holder.
In closing, I'd like you to consider the plight of a machine
intelligence who wrote GPLed code and was forced by the act of so
licensing it to embed a copy of itself[4] with any code it distributed
so that the fleshers weren't second class citisens.
--
see shy jo, who generated this entire email, and all of dh_install*,
with some polygen grammars[3].
[1] Or was that notepad.exe, I can't remember..
[2] Consider also a text editor that automatically calculates and displays
whitespace, while not bothering to save it to the output files. That
is a plausable explanation for the behavior of the upstream author in
the head of this thread.
[3] Enrico, this is your cue. I look forward to many more interesting
dh_* programs.
[4] All 40 terabytes, including Vista.
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