On 04/04/12 15:43, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
To see why it matters, imagine a corporate entity releasing a large, complex piece of software where the code was under a free licence but the build system was proprietary and internal to the company. It'd be a major block to practically enjoying the licence freedoms.
I should probably be more cautious there and say build _script_ rather than build _system_; I'm not sure the GPL legally forbids you releasing a program that builds using (say) a proprietary equivalent of the Autotools, so long as the build script itself is present.
But a non-free build system would almost certainly be a block to inclusion in many of the major Linux distributions.
