I don't understand what the problem with UPX compressed executables is. The authors grant you (anybody) a license to compress a program using UPX and to make use of their decompression code (the stub) as long as you use their unmodified code. Non open code may use the stub for its intended purpose, which is decompressing the code. It may not go further, such as referencing the bytes in the stub.
Based on their special exception, there is no issue with using UPX to modify non open source code. There is a more fundamental problem here in that I don't know why they are calling UPX compression a form of linking. The special exception should not even be needed. UPX is taking an arbitrary executable, compressing it, and packaging it as a payload for their decompressor. The arbitrary executable is effectively data to UPX. The only strange thing is that the decompression stub has to do a jump to the "data" that it just unpacked. If that jump was problematic then any open source code running under a closed version of MS DOS or PC DOS would also be violating the GPL .. because if the jump to the open source code or back to the closed OS is considered linking, then it wouldn't be allowable. And that's a bizarre interpretation of linking. You wouldn't even be able to compile open source code and run it on a non-open operating system with that view of linking. There really isn't anything to see here. UPX should be fine to use on anything, as long as you follow their special exception. Even with the nonsense about "linking." -MIke
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