On Tue, 2011-04-26 at 10:26 -0400, Martin Langhoff wrote: > > useless because children can install absolutely no additional software > > packages (they can't do "yum install"). > > Um - again you _can_ install sw in your homedir. Not as practical but > possible.
It would be quite painful for users. One would have to either rebuild all of Sugar in jhbuild with prefix set to /home/olpc/sugar, or copy the code manually from various system directories, then patch it in multiple places so it would run from this new location. I'd say it's beyond the ability of a young hacker whose only computer is a locked-down XO-1 with no way to install additional packages with yum. The GPL (both v2 and v3) requires that users be given the full source code in its *preferred* form for making modifications to it. The GPLv3 additionally requires that users be given the means to install and run modified versions. Quoting the license directly: “Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made. My feeling is that, in order to be in compliance, deployments would have to provide detailed instructions for installing Sugar in the user's home... or simply give them root access. Note that Sugar updating its license would simply add yet another violation to the existing ones: there are currently between 40 and 60 packages covered by the GPLv3 in a typical OLPC OS image, and the number is going to increase further when we switch to Fedora 14. -- Bernie Innocenti Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
