First of all, it's 2015, not 1982. (By the way, I got my inspiration for this from the July 1984 issue of *COMPUTE!* Magazine, which I got from the OpenLibrary project of the Internet Archive.)
Second, the machine code we type in, *if we receive any,* will most likely be 8086 machine code, not Motorola 68000 machine code. However, there are a lot of other Linux kernel--supported platforms out there: PowerPC, Intel Pentium, and SPARC are a few. I am proposing this as a possible alternative or complement to publication on the Internet to take into account those without Internet access, though those *with* Internet access also get the benefit. I'm CCing to the GCC mailing list. (For readers there, the rest of the thread is accessible at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2015-01/threads.html.) On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 01:32:21PM -0800, Ryan Cunningham wrote: > > When you receive a program in *object code* form, you would type it into > an > > object code editor and then save it in a binary file. > > Why? Is it 1982 again? Are we typing in 6502 machine code from a > glossy magazine? > > In the 21st century, if I "receive a program in object code form", it's > almost certainly going to be a digital delivery. I'll have the program > in the form of bytes on some kind of machine-readable medium (floppy, > CD, DVD, USB mass storage device), or I'll be receiving it from a > network socket (HTTP server, FTP server, etc.) and can store it on > nonvolatile medium of my own (hard drive, USB device, etc.). > > But, moving on.... > > > You would then run > > `chmod +x' on that binary file and then tell Bash to execute it (as > > *opposed* to interpreting a Bourne Shell script), hoping you didn't make > a > > mistake. > > Executing it doesn't really involve bash at all. You might use bash > to tell the kernel to execute it, but it's ultimately the kernel that > performs the loading and execution. > > > Again, I apologize for the confusion. > > But... what's the point of this discussion? Wasn't it something to do > with the GNU General Public License? I only glanced at the earlier > messages, but that was my gist. > > If you're trying to make some kind of legal argument about the GNU GPL > then you must be extremely precise. Typing "./foo" in bash does NOT > constitute the construction of some kind of derivative work which would > invoke the constraints of the GPL, or any other license. Typing "./foo" > does not load object code into bash's memory space. It is NOT similar > to loading a shared library or a loadable builtin. > > It doesn't matter where the object code came from or how it was placed > into your file system. > -- Ryan Cunningham
