On 30/08/13 20:08, erikthorsen wrote: > Firstly, Oracle (while admittedly being a big douchy at times) has > nothing to do with OpenWatcom, other than using it as a compiler for > the VirtualBox BIOS, so this is already nonsense.
If VirtualBox won't fully compile without non-free (or controversially licensed) software than this is certainly an issue. Compilers are large and complex, so it's not easy to workaround either. Trisquel, by the way, is supposed to be self-hosting, i.e. every package should be able to be built from scratch, as the developers wrote it, with entirely free software. > Apologize for not being able to work up any worry about this. Still > much better than, you know, the bios in your actual hardware. I wonder why Watcom didn't release their software under an existing software license? Maybe we should get specific. The license in question requires that, say, if a person or company compiles something using that compiler and deploys it they will have to publish the source code. I doubt they care about individual programmers. But, according to the FSF at least, companies deserve software freedom as well. There was discussion of the license in 2006 on the Debian bug tracker, so the license itself has been around for a while. One Debian developer had concerns about the patent license as well. You can read about it here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=376431 Andrew.
